WAYFARERthe spring 2019 | vol. 8 issue 1
Re-Imagining the Possible j Charting the Way for Change DEDICATION TO MARY OLIVER, WITH DEEP GRATITUDE “The leaf has a song in it. Stone is the face of patience. Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends.” —Mary Oliver
WAYFARERthe Re-Imagining the Possible j Charting the Way for Change
Welcome to the spring edition of The Wayfarer magazine.
Never doubt that a small group of inspired volunteers can change the world. In fact, its the only thing that ever has. –Margaret Mead
Since 2012, The Wayfarer has been offering literature, interviews, and art with the intention to inspires our readers, enrich their lives, and highlight the power for agency and change-making that each individual holds.
By our definition, a wayfarer is one whose inner compass is ever-oriented to truth, wisdom, healing, and beauty in their own wandering. The Wayfarer’s mission as a publication is to foster a community of contemplative voices and provide readers with resources and perspectives that support them in their own journey.
As we move into our 7th year, in the face of these frightening times we must endure, we renew our commitment to our readers to be a space of solace and our pledge to advocate for marginalized communities, the arts, and environmental conservation.
www.thewayfarer.homeboundpublications.com WAYFARERthe Re-Imagining the Possible j Charting the Way for Change
founder and editor-in-chief L.M. Browning
editor Theodore Richards
poetry editor Amy Nawrocki
associate editors Eric D. Lehman Gail Collins-Ranadive
the mindful kitchen Heidi Barr
staff writers David K. Leff Iris Graville
reader Marianne Browning J.K. McDowell
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The WayfarerTM is published biannually by Homeound Publications. No part of this publications may be used without written permission of the publisher. All rights to all original artwork, photography and written works belongs to the respective owners as stated in the attributions. 1 LETTER FROM The Editor by l.m. browning
4 SECTION ONE: re-imagining the possible
18 SECTION TWO columns
48 SECTION THREE: essays
76 SECTION FOUR: mindful kitchen
84 SECTION FIVE: poetry White Sands National Monument. Rising from the heart of the Tularosa Basin is one of the world’s great natural wonders—the glistening white sands of New Mexico. Great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert, creating the world’s largest gypsum dunefield. LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
As spring approaches and The Wayfarer enters its seventh year of publication, I am reminded that all things evolve—we are not static beings.
We are ever-shifting yet there is a core—a center—that remains the same even among the change. Some may call this center “the soul” while others “identity.” I believe it is a mix of the two composed of those things that we hold dear—our core values. Each individual’s values are different but there are some common needs and values most of us hold central: the desire to give and receive compassion, to find belonging, to be honest and receive honesty in return, to find meaning, to have purpose, to give and be given affection . . . . While all around us may evolve, this core holds steady.
In the spirit of evolution, The Wayfarer has recently undergone its own metamorphosis. Our faithful readers will recognize a new look but the same resonant tone of social awareness, authenticity, and reverence of all things wild.
Healing, change, awareness—all these things are a journey, not a destination. We appreciate your company as we continue down the path.
With Gratitude
L.M. BROWNING is an award-winning author of twelve books. Balancing her passion for writing with her love of learning, Browning sits on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers’ Association, she is a graduate of the University of London, and a Fellow with the International League of Conservation Writers. She is earning a degree in Creative Writing at Harvard University’s Extension School.
SECTION ONE
RE-IMAGINING THE POSSIBLE
A Deep Dive into the Creative Mind
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There are certain path crossings that stay with you as fated moments—certain strangers who seem familiar to you–as though while walking through a crowded market, you brush sleeves with someone who knows you but doesn’t know you. This was my experience meeting Frank LaRue Owen Jr. When last we sat together, it was in the dusty high-desert of God’s country. We sipped hot sake and ate sushi made with New Mexico Hatch green chile in a hidden away restaurant at the base of the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and talked of the strange trails we poets find ourselves on in life. Sitting across from him, he is a man removed from the ordinary, insightful yet unpretentious, who is ever-shifting in dimension and depth. He is a poet, descendant of cowboys, and a fellow traveler.
East Meets Southwest an interview with the poet frank larue owen by Leslie M. Browning
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Exploring the origins of his work, Frank LaRue Owen’s journalist Bill Moyers. From that I was led to the poetic poetry is influenced by dreams, the energies of landscape language of the Bhagavad Gita and The Upanishads, and and the seasons, archetypal psychology, the Ch’an/Daoist this stoked an early interest in world poetry, mystical hermit-poet tradition, and Zen living. He studied for poetry, and nature poetry, which then led me to the a decade with a Zen woman who—inspired by Ch’an Japanese poet Bashō. and Daoist tradition—blended silent illumination (meditation), dreamwork, mountain-and-forest Like so many of our ilk, I’ve also been inspired by the spirituality (“landscape practice”), and poetics into a works of Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder, David Whyte, Hafiz, unified path. Owen also studied eco-literature and eco- and Rumi. The poems of Joy Harjo, fellow Mississippian poetry with the late Jack Collom, a poet and professor Natasha Trethewey, Joseph Stroud, Jim Harrison, and all in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at of the female and male poets of the Chinese and Japanese Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His first book tradition are never far away. of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention, was the winner of the 2017 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize. His next As for a confluence of events, I would have to say the real offering, Temple of Warm Harmony is forthcoming from crossing of the bridge from being a lover of poetry to a Homebound Publications in August 2019. writer of poetry, in earnest, is inseparable from crossing paths with certain teacher figures in my life. They Leslie: What would you consider your creative origin to installed a confidence for diving in. be—what confluence of events came about to help you form your poetic voice? Leslie: Speaking of teachers, you studied eco-literature and eco-poetry with the late Jack Collom, in the Jack Kerouac Frank: Some of the very first poetic language I ever School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in encountered was the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, the Boulder, Colorado, which was founded in 1974 by Allen latter of which being an oracle from the ancient Chinese Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. What did you take away tradition. My mother studied the I Ching early in life as from your time at Naropa in a creative sense? part of her Jungian studies and shared it with me in my pre-teen years. In addition to being among some of the Frank: Mindfulness, and coming into a firm allyship oldest expressions of human literature, these works foster with one’s own heart-mind, undergirds everything at a means of thinking symbolically, poetically, oracularly. Naropa, from the various psychology programs to the writing program. The main takeaway I received from On the heels of this, I came across a book in my Jack, in particular, was the practice of deep observation father’s study entitled Black Elk Speaks, which was in creative work, on the one hand, and playfulness on the already a classic when it fell into my hands. The other. Jack was kind of a holy clown in my view, whose visionary experiences of this Lakota holy man, and the creative levity was contagious. He worked with people of mystical-poetic language Black Elk used to describe his all ages around poetry, including little kids in the Poets in East experiences, were a formative source that shaped me as Schools movement. Overall, though, what Naropa taught well. Additionally, Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s me creatively was permission to create. Mind set me on a search early on as a kid. Leslie: Beyond traditional learning spaces, we all have Meets Putting something to paper myself as a fledgling poet, to mentors who touch us deeply along our journey. You speak translate my own experiences, started in early high school. of a “Zen woman” your path converged with out in the This was before the internet, of course, so I frequented mountains of New Mexico—a landscape of deep magic Southwest libraries. Alongside my own poetic experimentation, I in and of itself. Would you mind telling us a little about studied various sources that supported this endeavour, this meeting and the impact this relationship had on your an interview with the poet frank larue owen from the writings of Jung to Joseph Campbell’s The creative work? by Leslie M. Browning Power of Myth, an extended interview conducted by the
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Frank: Known as doña Río to some of us, Darion was Leslie: You follow in her footsteps as a “mysterious figure.” a truly remarkable person who touched many lives in You seem a modern-day, reclusive, Zen hermit-poet more different ways. She was chameleon-like in her interests suited to the age of Ryōkan than that of this era. How do and in the methods she used in her guidance work with you see yourself within the current poetic landscape? individuals and groups, which she loosely called “life path exploration”. She would take on different qualities Frank: I definitely have a need and a leaning for solitude. and emphasize different approaches depending upon It is how I refuel and solitary time is when I am afforded who she was working with, and this included various the potential to delve into the creative process. In general, methods from Asian spiritual traditions, Mesoamerican I find many aspects of modernity overwhelming, if not sources, wilderness rites of passage work, and Jungian downright insane, so there is a lot about the world I psychological models. don’t engage with. But, that said, I wouldn’t call myself a recluse because I still enjoy being around people and have Reflective of this, for example, in my first phase of a commitment (at least for now) to stay engaged in the knowing her (the early and mid-90s in Colorado), we world and remain connected to community, such as it is. worked almost exclusively with Zen practice; namely silent illumination meditation, meditation on phrases I’m also not a true hermit by most people’s idea of the (known as huatou/wato in China and Japan), and term, but I do live a pretty solitary existence, and, at frequent knee-to-knee interviews that Japanese tradition times, have emulated the lifestyle of certain early Ch’an calls dokusan. When I look back on that time, I think poets who lived in urban settings, held day jobs, but she was just setting the stage for things to come, along stayed to themselves at night and went on mountain with trying to help me become more of an ally to my own retreats as often as they could to focus on their poetry heart-mind. and Zen practice.
Later on in the late 90s and 2000s, after a life detour on A lot of this may be a natural leaning for me, since even my part to D.C., and a move to New Mexico by her, at in my senior year of high school I avoided typical high which time she became more hermetical, her work with school activities. I would come in from the day, drop my me shifted. With a firm foundation of meditation having books, and head straight out into the forests behind my become second nature, the work became more focused mother’s house in North Carolina. on landscape and dreamscape, and poetics was a means of processing experiences with both. I made frequent Being a solitary in recent years is also due to cross-country trips each year to New Mexico to study circumstance. From 1995 to 2005, I was very active out this Southwestern “green chile Cowboy Zen” with her, in the world. In fact, I was facilitating retreats along the including whole months at a time, and “the classroom”, themes of dreams, consciousness, contemplative practice, the “zendo”, so to speak, was a mix of time in an adobe nature, and ecopsychology. However, in 2005, and house in Santa Fe, time in the forests of the Pecos especially in 2007 when doña Río died, I intentionally Wilderness, and time out in the desert. turned inward. Initially, grief was the motivator. But, then I began exploring the biographies of certain hermit- Despite knowing her as well as I did, she remains a poets and felt an immediate affinity with how they had mysterious figure to me. She was very much a horse arranged their lives. person, was constantly doing dreamwork throughout the day (because, in her own words, “We’re never not Some years I would put this exploration on the back dreaming”), but I only know small fragments about her burner and, for example, focus on relationship. Other life, which included her own experiences studying with years, my creative process has been the only thing for Ch’an and Taoist teachers, and trips into southern Mexico which I have held space. Both types of cycles have taught to study with a curandera and a seer. me a great deal.
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“As I age, living a slower pace becomes even more important to me; to connect with the land, to practice Zen, to explore ancestral energies, cultural streams, and heritage, and to write.
This year, I’m crossing into my 50s, and also clocking the sun-like Dao.” Sometimes that is what my creative my fourteenth year of wandering down the same path I process has felt like. began walking with doña Río, spiritually and creatively. I have no idea where it is all going. As I age, living a slower Lately, the working metaphor for my creative process pace becomes even more important to me; to connect has been riding a horse. Writing has begun to feel akin with the land, to practice Zen, to explore ancestral to saddling-up, heading out on a trail, and journeying energies, cultural streams, and heritage, and to write. But, beyond known trails into uncharted territories. In some yes, most days I feel like you could probably drop me in cases, the “horse” is the horse of memory, taking me back a Japanese forest or back behind a mesa in New Mexico, into childhood, or into the multidimensional muscle and I’d be okay. memory and memory of the senses that gets registered when visiting a place. Where this places me in the poetic landscape I’m not entirely certain. Perhaps one way of putting it is this. I’m currently working on my third book, Stirrup of the All poets are oriented to paying attention. They are Sun & Moon, which is tethered to experiences of memory attuned to the life around them. I am as well, but I’m also of mind, dream, and place. My heart-mindstream is oriented to the life of nature, the inner life, and other awash in a cascade of images, insights, and impressions, non-obvious realities. so my creative process has become one of registering these impressions, sifting through them as if panning Leslie: Delving into your practice of holding space, tell us for gold. A few of these kinds of poems have made prior about your creative process. appearances, such as “Quantum Travel” in The School of Soft-Attention (2018), but now I’m following the Frank: My creative process is definitely a lived and living thread more closely where mindscape, dreamscape, and experience. Various natural images come to mind that landscape touch. express this. Climbing a mountain. Disappearing into a forest enveloped in clouds. A river that has its own Practically speaking, I wake up with my creative process particular flow but which also reflects, in some sense, every day because the moment I awake I am processing what it encounters as it flows along. impressions from the dreamtime. So, notetaking, journaling, and trying to pull dream vignettes and At times, my creative process has felt like attending to a fragments through the permeable membrane of rather cosmic relationship; to what East Asian cultures consciousness that separates the dreaming and waking call the Dao (Tao, The Way). As I say in the Preface of worlds is part of my daily course. That, and talking out The Temple of Warm Harmony, “...’round and ‘round loud to myself. [Laughs]
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I live alone so I may even talk out loud to myself as a Frank: Become an apprentice to your deeper self. means of conjuring flashes of the dreaming mind so as This includes one’s dreams and the wise characters to bring through the images that were experienced in a found therein. It also includes checking in with dream, or that are still fluttering about at the periphery yourself multiple times during the day. Surface world of awareness in the dreaming body (which, of course, technological distractions can be a real obstacle to extends beyond the physical body). This activity is really such deeper attunement. There is a natural human rooted in the technique of active imagination from the wisdom inherent in the person that practices mindful Jungian tradition. It works well with dreams, it works attentiveness. Make it a practice. well with poetry, and some day I hope to apply it to the realm of fiction. Trust that one’s own voice is linked to one’s creative process, which has a life of its own. It has its own flow; Leslie: What do you think the role of the poet is in the you’re just along for the ride. You can paddle and steer, current world climate? but you can’t push the river.
Frank: We are living in a truly disturbing time. Not to Trust that one’s voice and creativity has a purpose that oversimplify current conditions, or add unnecessary has its own seasons and rhythms. Live closely according layers of lathered-up fear, but the energetic reality we to those rhythms. Live in attunement with the seasons of are in strikes me as a battle of wills, conscience, and your creative life. Honor the fallow times just as much as consciousness. the inspired and abundant times of creative harvest.
There are some whose consciousness is on a destructive When it comes to creative writing, eject modernity’s cold, footing. Destructive of earth. Destructive of societal, lifeless notions of writing being mechanical and product economic, and governmental norms. Others of us reject focused. If you want to do writing like that, get a job in this on civic, environmental, and humanitarian grounds. advertising.
The poet in such times is what the role of the poet I would also add, try holding the notion that writing (or has always been: serving as a collective conscience (not any creative endeavour) is not an exclusively intellectual holding our tongue about injustice, for example), but exercise. Try on the experience of writing as a full-bodied also reminding us all that, despite the presence of despots somatic experience including giving voice to hunches, of delusion and dysfunction, that the numinous level impressions, 24/7 lucid dreaming, like picking up of reality—of beauty, of grace, of healing, of sacred flavours and aromas from the ethers. Creativity can be a mystery—still exists, and will endure. multidimensional experience involving senses beyond just the five we usually rely upon. In this way, the poet can be a healer, a transmitter of perennial wisdom, and a culture of harmony rather Held in this way, there is no such thing as writer’s block. than degradation and divisiveness. Indeed, as both Even when you aren’t actively writing, you realize you’re conscience and purveyor of elevated consciousness, the working, or are ‘being worked,’ by the larger process; poet can remind us all who we really are, individually what I call “the poet’s dreaming body” is actively and collectively. It seems to me we need both of these working, observing, recording, seeing. Learning to trust functions now more than ever. in that feels related to trusting one’s creative voice. Don’t dismiss anything in your experience. Leslie. What words of hard-earned wisdom would you impart to those creative minds still seeking out their voice and getting ready to “saddle up” and head out onto the trail?
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The Bouquet of the Last Direction Instructions Hanging by Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft-Attention from a Weather-Beaten Branch by Frank LaRue Owen, The Temple of Warm Harmony When the soul becomes unburdened it’s like a new saddle on a fresh horse. To illuminate The Way, study the wayfarers of old. Suddenly the trail feels right again, and the strong horizon line in front of you as you turn Take up the Timeless Work becomes its own form of soothing medicine. of untangling the soul.
Something of the sting and burn of the old poison may linger Align heart-mind but having crossed over from the Shadowlands with Nature’s flow. into new open territory, one can almost pick up the scent of blooming flowers within. Journey into the dark to mine the hidden gold. You start to notice all the things you hadn’t been all because you’d been so bound up When the Lantern-Lit Mind with the echoes of losses and hauntings. abides in Silent Illumination, the wayfarer’s poems bear the mark You know you’re ready when ghosts of the Great Transformation. start chanting from the edge of your life: Traveler! Good Traveler! Your ‘Crying for a Vision’ Time is over. Mountainwise Storehouse Time to re-inhabit the Human World! by Frank LaRue Owen, The Temple of Warm Harmony
Then, the simplest of the ten thousand things Ceaseless reminders. start to reach out to you to welcome you home again. Worldly imperfection.
The Morningstar. People, The blue sky with its utter completeness. whole worlds, The serrated clouds coming over the rising pine-covered hills. out of harmony Even the food tastes better in the Land of the Great Eastern Sun. with the Way.
You may find the wandering wild animal of your heart Centuries of misalignment is somehow more free to travel back through time… leave spine-jolting ruts ...to pick back up with sources of beauty in the road. and power you had put down. This is why And maybe, just maybe, we go to the you’ll see yourself now mountains; through your childhood eyes to remember and you’ll stand forgiven and realize the Great Realignment the magic you had then never left you; always available you just forgot how to listen. to the supple-hearted.
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EXPLORING THE DIVINE MYSTERY
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR MIRABAI STARR BY L.M. BROWNING
Mirabai Starr is an author, translator of the with iconographer, William Hart McNichols; God of mystics, and a leading voice in the emerging interspiritual Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and movement, using fresh, lyrical language to help make Islam, which was named the winner of the New Mexico/ timeless wisdom accessible to a contemporary circle of Arizona Book Award for Religion and one of the Best seekers. Spiritual Books of 2012 by the website Spirituality & Practice, and won the 2014 Nautilus Gold Award for She has received critical acclaim for her revolutionary new Religion and Spirituality in the Western Traditions, and translations of , by 16th-century Dark Night of the Soul her newest book is Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross; The Interior Castle Loss and Transformation. and The Book of My Life, by St. Teresa of Avila; and The Showings of Julian of Norwich. Daughter of the counter-culture, Starr was born in New York in 1961 to secular Jewish parents who challenged She is author of the six-volume Sounds True series, institutionalized religion and were active in the anti-war Contemplations, Prayers, and Living Wisdom; a poetry protest movement of the Vietnam era. In 1972, the family collection, Mother of God Similar to Fire, a collaboration embarked on an extended road trip that led them to
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settle in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico. There, they So then, I guess I would say that the big opening was, embraced an alternative, “back-to-the-land” lifestyle, in again, around another death actually. When I was 13, a communal effort to live simply and sustainably, values my first love died, Phillip, in a gun accident. And that that remain important to Starr to this day. totally catapulted me into a place of deep sorrow, of course, an almost psychosis. The grief was so intense that As a teenager, Starr lived at the Lama Foundation, an it shattered me and in that shattering, it reopened that intentional spiritual community in New Mexico that doorway into that realm of holy mystery and that was it. has honored the world’s spiritual traditions since its Somehow, I conflated Phillip with God in some ways in inception in 1968. The foundation’s focus has always my heart. So that my longing for my boyfriend opened rested on the mystical heart of each path, and Starr was up this longing for God. And around that same time, I trained from an early age to recognize and celebrate the was cast in the lead role in a school play about the life of interconnections between and among all faiths. Mirabai, the 16th Century Bhakti poet, Indian poet. And Formerly an adjunct professor of philosophy and world it was really just in the height of my grieving for Phillip, religions at the University of New Mexico for 20 years, my loss of my boyfriend. And when I played Mirabai, I Starr is a certified grief counselor and speaks and teaches felt inhabited by her. I felt like she really came in to me nationally and internationally on the teachings of the and through me and sang her beautiful love songs to mystics, contemplative practice, and grief as a spiritual Krishna, the God of Love. Then I was given that name practice. Her talks and retreats incorporate silent right afterwards, that summer. So it was the spring that meditation, interspiritual chanting, sacred poetry, and I turned 14, and then that Summer, Ram Dass officially gave me the name. deep dialog. She blogs for the Huffington Post. And so Mirabai, who was an ecstatic poet devoted to *** the God of Love, became the inspiration, really, and EXPLORING THE DIVINE MYSTERY Leslie: So, let’s start at the beginning. What first guide and exemplar for my life ‘cause I so identified with sparked your earliest passions for mysticism and writing? her passion for union with God, but also for beautiful AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR MIRABAI STARR language. I mean, her love language was so exquisite. Mirabai: Well, in some ways they were two different BY L.M. BROWNING She was the quintessential poet, like Rumi. She was very sparks. But, I was always a writer. From the time I could connected to the natural world, so her poetry was just make letters, I made poems. And then short stories. And, steeped in metaphors from the natural world, which I think that where writing and mysticism converge is really spoke to me. I lived here in the mountains of around death. My older brother, Mattie, died when he Northern New Mexico, which is, as you mentioned, such was 10 and I was 7. He had a brain tumor. And ... you as sacred landscape. And so, even though it was a very know, a child is so close to the original mystery anyway, different landscape from 16th Century Northern India, I but somehow his death blew that door back open. And I really related to her love of the natural world. felt ... this access, of course I wouldn’t have described it that way at the time, it just was what it was. But, looking Leslie: What you’re saying, resonates with me on so back I see that it gave me access to this vast realm of the many levels, especially the grief and the breaking open sacred. And, I didn’t have any language for it. My family and the psychosis. I’ve experienced the same kind of was entirely non-religious, maybe even anti-religious. alignment as well. I mean, it’s sad, and yet at the same time I understand what you’re saying on a level that can’t So, there was no context outside of my own subjective be conveyed really. experience for what was happening. But that sense of proximity to the holy mystery. Then, because I was a So, we’ve touched on your poetic inspirations. So, who poet and had a poet’s soul, I began to be more and more were your mentors along the way, be they flesh and blood drawn as I became more literate, as I got older as a child, teachers by your side, or sages of art and literature? to other forms of poetry. My father would feed me poetry from the classics and things like the lyrics of Bob Dylan Mirabai: Yeah, right. Both, for sure. So many. I am, as I songs that were really...kind of, magical realism. have confessed elsewhere, spiritually promiscuous. I have
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intimate connections with multiple spiritual traditions. Leslie: No, that’s fantastic. So across the traditions, I have my mentors both embodied and archetypal energies. Mirabai: My other early influences would be Rumi, who I connected with as a Sufi master before the new accessible Let’s see. In the realm of the living, once living ... I guess translation spike. Robert Bly made him available to I would say ... And he is definitely still living. Is that my everyone. At the time, this was the 70’s, he was a pretty longest standing spiritual influence has been Ram Dass. obscure Sufi teacher, but I connected deeply with him. I’ve never called him my teacher because he is my elder Which lead me to connect with Saint John of the Cross guru brother. In other words, we both have a devotion when I was 20. So I was a Sufi as a teenager and always to the great Indian Sage Neem Karoli Baba. So Ram Dass will feel close to the Sufi path. Very close. But then, has been for many of us the one who led the way in that through my residence with the poetry of Rumi and he introduced so many of us to Myogi when he met him spiritual teachings embedded in Rumi, I found John of in India in the 60’s and brought him to America. Many the Cross when I was studying Spanish literature in Spain westerners went, in fact, to India to meet Myogi when when I was 20 years old. he was still alive. Myogi is the sentient name for Neem Karoli Baba. Yeah. So I really fell in love with him. And back to Sufism for a moment, another, besides Neem Karoli Baba, Ram So, Ram Dass has been a huge influence on me and Dass’ and my teacher ... guru, the other really strong people have said to me that when I’m teaching, I sound spiritual teacher in my life has been Murshid Samuel like a girl version of Ram Dass. And I’m in no way trying Lewis, known as Murshid Sam, who was a great 20th to emulate him but I see how I cannot extricate myself century American Sufi teacher who created the dances from his influence because it’s so much part of me, of universal peace. They’re done all over the world. They because I was so young. I was 15 when I started traveling used to be called Sufi dancing. And he’s buried at Lama and being with Ram Dass ... and over the years have Foundation where I lived as a teenager in New Mexico. maintained that close connection. And now, I teach in his Lama Foundation is also probably my single biggest lineage as one of the Dharma teachers. That’s probably influence as a spiritual seeker and teacher. Because Lama my strongest influence. is a place, was then and continues to be, a place where all spiritual paths are welcome and studied and practiced. So But our guru, Neem Karoli Baba is really the ... Lama calls itself “a meeting of the waves” and that was a probably my strongest spiritual guide. And also, Neem huge influence of Murshid Sam who was buried there. Karoli Baba, right before he died, he gave his Dharma transmission, but they don’t call it that in Hinduism ... So the meeting of the wave, Lama affirms the truth of all he passed on responsibility for his devotees to a woman spiritual paths, and therefore there’s no single leader or named Sri Siddhi who very quietly took up that mantle one spiritual tradition that claims to be “it”. Leadership of Neem Karoli Baba in India. And she just died a year at Lama is egalitarian and it rotates on a lunar cycle. New ago. And she was very important to me in that, in fact, moon to full moon, full moon to new moon, so everyone the epilogue of my memoir, Caravan of No Despair, is in the community has a rotating opportunity and also about her. And my new book, Wild Mercy, is dedicated a responsibility of guiding the community spiritually. to her. So she’s a huge influence on me. So whether you’re a 24 year old first year resident or someone in your 60’s or 70’s who’s traveled around the Another woman who I have always looked to is world and lived in monasteries, everyone has a chance to Anandamayi Ma from India who was an ecstatic teacher step up and hold the spiritual heart of the community. of devotion and non-duality. And she didn’t claim any So Lama was my primary influence in many ways. I know particular lineage. One of the things I love about her, is I’ve already said Ram Dass was and Murshid Sam was but that she had an awakening, a spontaneous awakening in ... her 20’s, and she initiated herself. Which is unheard of for a woman in India.
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Leslie: You don’t have to choose one, as you’ve just So, this wave of people who do not subscribe to any mentioned. It’s okay. Yeah, that’s quite a concept that religious tradition and in fact, are very suspicious of they have there. I’d never heard of them. religion, does not coincide with a disinterest with spirituality. In fact, quite the opposite. Many, many Mirabai: Yeah, and I speak about them in my book, God people are really hungry for spiritual experience and are of Love, and also in my new book, Wild Mercy. I have a trying to figure out how to navigate that longing in this whole section on Lama and how they operate. The actual emerging landscape that doesn’t have clear spaces for the structure ... the social and political structure, if you will, way that they feel. So, the way that they feel is often what of Lama. I would call an inter-spiritual impulse. They see, because And so, the other two people I would say are Father of this globalized world that we live in partly. We’re no Thomas Keating, has had a very strong influence on me. longer in these little tribal spaces where we have to buy He really loved John of the Cross and he really illumined into existing belief systems and descend them. We’ve been John of the Cross for me and centering prayer I think, has exposed to many, many ways of seeing the world. And been such an important spiritual practice that has reached so, people feel I think, very naturally drawn to the living many, many people. And helped us find our way through truths of all the world’s wisdom waves. the holy silence. And so, they will, at a time of transition in their lives, say a wedding or a death or a birth, especially those big life Leslie: I was wondering if you could expand more on changes. People naturally will find a poetry of the mystics this central concept of yours, the inter-spirituality. And of various spiritual traditions and they’ll look for rituals it kinda blends very neatly with everything that you’ve from all of the world’s wisdom waves and incorporate been talking about and the intersection that is your own them into these meaningful moments. And I think that heart and your own soul. This philosophy, I feel, is keenly people are also looking for inter-spiritual community. needed at this time of polarization and this reemerging That is spaces and collections of people who also affirm face of racism. Can you tell our readers a little bit about these living perennial truths and are willing to investigate the premise of inter-spirituality? them and practice them. So practice spaces where people Mirabai: Well, yeah. It’s a tricky concept in some ways and can do a Sufi dance and then a session of centering prayer I’m also concerned that even naming it, “inter-spirituality and then read some Sufi poetry. And find all the rich or the inter-spiritual path,” is going to turn it into resources that are available to us in this interconnected another “ism”. And the entire purpose of affirming the world in which we find ourselves. essential truth at the heart of all religious and spiritual traditions is to transcend the boxes that human beings So that’s inter-spirituality. It’s about harvesting the fruits like to put the truth in, and in which we kill the truth. of wisdom and awakening and social justice across the So, in fact I’ve kind of distanced myself from the inter- spectrum of the spiritual landscape. And not just for spiritual movement, as a movement precisely because of ourselves. Not just for our own private liberation, but this. for the benefit of all beings and the earth herself. And so it’s the other thing that I’m noticing in the inter-spiritual However, the concept is essential, as you say, during these impulse among younger people especially, is this lack of ... divisive times. And I think, not only is it a remedy for dualistic definition between action and contemplation. the polarization and toxicity that we’re seeing, but it’s Between the personal, private, spiritual life and the larger also a response to it. I think there’s this deep grass roots world of social and environmental concerns. response, especially among a younger generation that is from their 20’s to their 40’s. And ... let’s see, how do I say So people really are starting to get that the reason that we this. In which there is this deep hunger for authentic and gather these jewels from all of the spiritual traditions is so even rigorous spiritual practice and spiritual awakening. that we can have some kind of inner transformation that But an allergy to religiosity and to existing institutional awakens us and resources us to step up and be a resource religious structures. to others. To activate on behalf of the earth ... from a deep, grounded place of recognizing, in every cell of our
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being, that everything is interconnected. And therefore, But then, of course, over the last few years, I have been what else could we possibly ... what other response unable to avoid speaking about and on behalf of the could we possibly have by turning inward than to allow feminine. Simply because in this relative realm in which the pain of the world to enter us and then step up and we all dwell, it is an issue. In five-thousands of years of do what we can to alleviate suffering. Not from some patriarchy has attempted to crush feminine wisdom and intellectual idea or recognition of the brokenness of the feminine power. And it’s time to ... heal the wounds that world, but from a self experience of inter-being. have been inflicted on the feminine. All of us, men and women, need to step up in that healing process, help find Leslie: Before I let you go, I can’t let you go without a balance, achieve balance by emphasizing and drawing asking about your new book, Wild Mercy: Living the out and calling on the treasure trove of wisdom of the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of Women Mystics. It’s set for feminine that has been hidden. release April 2nd and ... in this timely work, you fiercely declare the feminine mystic is one who gathers the pain Leslie: Thank you so much for sharing just a glimpse of the world into her arms and transmutes it with wild of what took place behind the scenes as you crafted this mercy and emerging a fierce courage with the unstoppable together. And I’m sure painstakingly over months and forces of forgiveness, compassion, and love. She is needed years. now, more than ever. So, where did this latest book start Mirabai: Years, yeah. And it’s still happening, by the way. for you? And what message are you hoping that it imparts Just ‘cause the book’s gone to print, it’s not the end of to those who bring it into their homes? the story. Every day I’m learning more and more now Mirabai: Well, it started with a course that I have been that I’ve opened the door to this. So, I think that my teaching for a number of years on The Shift Network on upcoming retreats and workshops, I’m not doing this to women mystics. The way of the feminine mystic, I think sell them, it just totally popped into my head just now. was one of the titles. It had several titles over the years, That that’s the space where I’m going to continue. We, but it was always an exploration of women mystics across together as a community, are going to continue to do this the spiritual traditions and also goddesses. Like ... Tara, work. So, I’m doing a bunch of Wild Mercy gatherings Kwan Yin . . . . all of those great feminine archetypes and across the country in 2019 and 2020. And I know that the myths of the world. that’s where the wise ones who gather with me will contribute to this tapestry of awakening that we, men I have noticed that I am a kind of blend of a non-dual and women, all need to do together. spiritual seeker. In other words, I’ve experienced and I continue to cultivate states of non-dual awareness So I’m really looking forward to who shows up at these in which I allow my separate self to dissolve into “the gatherings with their jewels of feminine wisdom to add one”. And, I’m also this wild devotional being, like my to the mix. Because that’s the thing about the feminine, namesake Mirabai, who is madly in love with a God who Leslie, is that it’s not about one particular smart dude I don’t necessarily believe in with my mind. But always who’s sitting up there on their throne dispensing their have been drawn to this deliciously dualistic relationship wisdom. It’s about all of us, and I’m very much ... my with the holy mystery that I often refer to as “Beloved”. way of teaching is very communal. It’s about mining the jewels in the circle, whatever circles gather. So it’s For years, avoided even talking about masculine and ongoing and it’s a collective process of awakening to the feminine in any kind of sense of the duality between the wisdom of the feminine. masculine spiritual path and the feminine spiritual path. I felt like enough time had been spent in academia, the Leslie: And I was just going to say, one final question is people hashing out the ways in which men and women where can our readers learn more about those gatherings? are different or not different, and that the masculine way of thinking or ... religiosity is different than the feminine. Mirabai: Yeah, wonderful. My website, mirabaistarr.com. I just thought, let’s leave that to the people who are interested in making dualistic proclamations. I’m not.
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COLUMNS
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” –John Lubbock
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“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.” –John Muir
THE LANDSCAPE AND THE ALCHEMY OF TRANSCENDENCE THE TRAVEL COLUMN BY L.M. BROWNING
We’ve progressed as a civilization but not all advances in the “old ways” (i.e.: nature-based religions) are add to our lives, and in our rush to move forward, we’ve mainstreaming. There is an entire branch of psychology left some vital things behind, the wild being one of them. devoted to exploring the connection between the mind They say when the body is deficient in certain elements, and nature. It is called “Ecopsychology.” The term was the deficiency will show itself in our craving certain first used by Theodore Roszak in his work The Voice of foods—some instinctual part of us knows what we need the Earth. Ecopsychologist Dr. Ginny Anderson, reflects, and seeks it out even if we are unconscious of it. I believe, “Ecopsychology studies the relationship between human when the soul is lacking—when it is wounded or sick—it beings and the natural world through ecological and seeks out what we are deficient in, which will ultimately psychological principles.” heal us, and so often the elements the soul needs to heal are found in nature. The role of the wilderness in healing Whether we turn to classic examples such as Henry David from the cruelties of life has been documented by those Thoreau, who found his solace following the unexpected creative minds who went in search of their own sanity death of his brother while living alongside Walden among the still-wild places. Pond; or Walt Whitman, who gathered his idealistic compassion for humanity among the leaves of grass only What aspect of the natural landscape seems to regather his sanity in those same fields following the to bring about such a radical shift within our Civil War; or John Muir, who found his own balance in his first summer in the Sierras and who, long before inner-landscape that time after time such pivotal the digital din erupted, foresaw the cure to our modern moments have been captured by the minds of maladies in the wild silence. A contemporary example each generation? of the broken seeker can be found in the memoir Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Encapsulating the disillusionment and Make no mistake, these “deficiencies” we are suffering as brokenness driving so many into the landscape Strayed the soul ails are not existential, they are keenly physical. writes, “I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also With anxiety disorders rates peaking—”affecting nearly a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I 40 million adults in the United States of America age was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or 18 and older, or 18.1% of the population every year.” if there was such a place, or even what the word faith ADAA and psychologists increasingly turning to “green meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be therapies” the healing aspect of nature, so prominent
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“The role of the wilderness in healing from the cruelties of life has been documented by those creative minds who went in search of their own sanity among the still-wild places.”
possibly potent and possibly fake.” It is this unmoored 1. The Loss and The Subsequent Denial and place many journeyers find themselves in when they set Shock: In this stage, we can face what has out into nature. Strayed’s quote perfectly describes the ache that drives us into the wild yet leaves us with the befallen us and often self-medicate as a way to question: when we are at our most vulnerable and go into avoid our reality. nature to find that healing, what is it that we find there in the wild that soothes us so? 2. Anger and Guilt: In this stage, we become angry with the people, or the god, or the world Cheryl Strayed is a memoirist, essayist, a columnist with The Rumpus under the pen name “Dear Sugar.” Though who could do such painful things to us. It is also is most well-known for Wild during which she chronicles normal in this stage to point the anger inward her journey up the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) following and blame ourselves for what has happened to her mental decline after losing her mother unexpectedly. Newly divorced, addicted to heroin, living morally askew, us, in a spiral of self-hatred. lost to herself and her family, Strayed set out to reclaim herself on the PCT. From a physical standpoint, her 3. Seeking a Savior: In this stage, we go outside time on the PCT is a forced withdraw from her heroin of ourselves, wanting someone or something to addiction and a self-imposed isolation after years of risky “cure” us. Whether it is God or a lover or a behavior. From an internal—spiritual—standpoint the wilderness acts as a mirror bringing Cheryl face-to-face quick fix, we are desperate to find someone to with the one thing she can’t face: the loss of “the love of “save us.” her life” . . . her mother. 4. Depression and Despair: In this stage, there is Beyond her story and into the wider scope of the world, a deepening of the sadness and despair, which is Wild highlights the state we come to in this present age— it sketches out the archetypal “decline” and the journey really at the root of the aforementioned stages. of reclamation that follows. This journey seems to have phases, much the same way that grief does, only what 5. Radical Acceptance: the moment when you we are grieving for is the person we used to be, which realize that your healing is your responsibility circumstance has brought to an end—broken, killed. As I observe it—and have explored below in my own regardless of who or what is to blame for your adaptation of the Kubler-Ross model of Grief, the stages decline. are:
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Throughout her journey, Strayed is grieving for her lineage of “lost” seekers inherently pulled into the wild, mother but also for the women her mother had raised as though a part of them knows that that is where their her to be, and the PCT was her path to peace and back peace lies. to herself. Strayed’s journey brings into relief those moments that so many of us come to in life wherein As these seekers set out, the journey takes place across the circumstance has devastated us, and we must start landscape and yet there is another journey taking place clearing away the rubble to make room for the new. Her within—it is a dual journey. story speaks to the inner-state we have when we begin the journey: everything is in question and we go into For Strayed, being wild seemed the opposite of lost, nature seeking clarity. What exactly within us that pulls making the reader ask: if in being disconnected with us inwardly into nature to seek that healing is another the wild, am I disconnected from myself. Wildness is mystery all together, though seems to fall in line with a authentic, it is raw, it is apart from pretending and denial
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and doesn’t allow for avoidance. Perhaps that is why it is abuse, loss…—and that the absorption of this ugliness such a great facilitator for truth—because it doesn’t allow contributes toward the afflictions we live within our us to turn away—and acceptance of reality is a huge part adult life—depression, hurt transmuted into rage, of healing from trauma. anxiety, despair, dissociation, denial, psychosis, weariness, pessimism—all those things that create mental and At the end of her hike down the Pacific Crest Trail, emotional strains (wounds) within us. In its simplest Strayed sat thinking back on her journey, ruminating form, perhaps the ability of nature to heal the wounded on what peace meant. Did it mean finding forgiveness? parts of us is that we are traumatized by ugliness—ugly No. It meant accepting herself—and her life—in all its sights seen, ugly words absorbed, ugly actions done unto imperfection and messiness. Nature didn’t provide an us, ugly experiences—and the remedy for this damage escape from the pain or ugliness but a melding with it—a done by ugliness is beauty—those natural sights that coming to terms. Along the path, Strayed realized she seem enwrapped in an inherent grace that brings us didn’t have to explain why she had done all that she had to a moment of awe. The mind is scarred by inhuman done or justify why her insanity may have been the sane ugliness. The salve for that wound is natural beauty. It is reaction to an insane situation, instead she just owned it the balance of imbalance. all: After exploring my own experiences of wounds and “It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on wildness, it seems to me that transcendence is the alchemy that white bench on the day I finished my hike. of transmuting pain into peace, dark into light, senseless into meaning, loss into growth, and death into rebirth. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to When the buildup of pain and loss amassed across our know. That is was enough to trust that what I’d life is not transmuted it becomes toxic to the mind and done was true . . . To know that seeing the fish body. Transcendence is the work of creating a meaningful beneath the surface of the water was enough. life. It is the work of regulating the health of the soul. It That it was everything. It was my life—like all is the work of redistributing the balance of the mind. It lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred… .” is the process of finding a way to gather the ugliness built up upon us as a result of cruel circumstance, and rolling In her book, The Hour of Land, Terry Tempest Williams, it over into a triumphant renewal. writes, “Wilderness is not a place of isolation but contemplation. Refuge. Refugees . . .. Wilderness is a Positive outcome shouldn’t be aimed for, meaning is the knife that cuts through pretense and exposes fear. Even goal when trying to quell any despair. From meaning will in remote country, you cannot escape your mind.” Is the stem peace, resolve, and healing. In the shadow of the solitude inherent to the wilderness a mirror to the soul suffering and senseless loss we face in this life, happiness showing us all that we cannot otherwise see? Perhaps. is sometimes too far off to reach. Meaning, however, is Is wilderness the landscape where we face our internal achievable and will lead into the happiness we seek. The hungry ghosts? Yes. But what alchemy happens there opposite of suffering is not happiness but meaning. The in the wild that is such a tonic for these wounds in us opposite of loss is fullness. The opposite of brokenness beyond modern medicine? is not restoration to your original state, but a belief in betterment. The landscape provides the necessary silence. The Irish poet and priest, John O’Donahue, explores These two elements combined—ink and wild—save many an idea that is seemingly at the heart of the answer we of us when all else has failed. seek when he ruminates on the role of beauty, “We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets At the end of her trail of personal reclamation, Strayed the needs of our soul.” Perhaps, the healing element writes, “I’d finally come to understand what it had of nature is the raw beauty of it. The mind/heart is been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had damaged by ugliness—violence, vulgarity, poverty, wanted to find was a way in.” Answering her question
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years before it was even written, Muir reflects, “I only land. Perhaps it is somehow fitting to look to the poets as went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till our guides along the trail; for they are the word weavers sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” who have the power to name the nameless and explore the intangible. American Poet David Wagoner captures When in the mindset of trauma, it is nearly impossible the connection of the human-wild bond in the last line of to believe change will ever come; a belief in betterment is his poem “Lost.” the hardest belief to hold. When the majority of what you have known is ugliness, the inescapable thought is that . . . You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows the entire world is ugly. We become so convinced of this Where you are. You must let it find you. in our depression and resignation, and are unable to live under the weight of it. To discover beauty in a world you thought only to be barren is to be reborn into possibility. “The forest knows where you are. You must let it find Nature is the doorway. There, in the wild silence, we you.” . . . Those who are lost want to be found—they behold the beauty of redemption. want to be embraced. Someone once said, “In going into a forest, we go into an established community waiting to While we can convey certain aspects of this alchemy, embrace us.” Perhaps that is why we outcasts, we fringe- many dimensions of the wild are ineffable. Along her dwellers, we who life has pummelled and broken go unto journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, Strayed carried The the wild, like orphans seeking a new family after life has Dream of a Common Language a poetry collection by wronged us so. Adrienne Rich with her as she attempted to understand what was beyond words—both within herself and the
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LUNANS, AND THE GRACE OF GRAVITY THE ENVIRONMENTAL COLUMN BY GAIL COLLINS RANADIVE
Yuk! A huge glob of gum on the bottom of my shoe I’d brought my daughters to see the moon rock, a tourist affixed me to the floor of the gift shop at the National Air attraction ranking right up with the Grand Canyon at the and Space Museum. But suddenly ‘yuck’ became Yes! time. We were pretty pleased with our American selves for beating the Soviet Union to the moon those fifty years ago The shiny metal manmade interior of the museum had next July. But the sight of the gray, barren, lifeless stone been depressing rather than amazing me, and I couldn’t left me cold. put my finger on why. Now as my foot felt the pull of earth’s gravity, I knew with my hometown poet Robert I’d missed seeing the actual mission but I was listening to Frost that ‘earth’s the right place for love; I don’t know it over transistor radio in a rural area of Nicaragua, a Latin where it’s likely to go better.’ American nation we’d had been meddling in for decades.
“...the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event.” –Thomas Berry
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Standing in an airless, windowless dirt-floored dwelling transition soon, it will be too late to matter. Yet our while a woman gave birth and we tried to convince her to government has ‘doubled down’ on fossil fuel exploration, let us to put blindness preventing drops in her newborn’s exploitation, and exportation: its stated mission is world eyes made me wonder why we were spending so many energy domination. As our so-called ‘leaders’ claim they resources to explore the moon when there was so much don’t believe in climate change, they fail to realize that the that needed doing on earth. forces of nature, like global warming and gravity, aren’t subject to their ill-advised opinions. It was only much later that I learned the lunar landing had more to do with domination than discovery: why else In my memory, I run out of the Air and Space Museum would my partner’s employer, a defense contractor, have to scrape the gum off my shoe and kneel down in wonder been awarded the challenge to design and build the rockets at the lone dandelion poking up through a crack in the that would put a spacecraft up there? Planting the U.S. sidewalk. And I wonder with Father Thomas Berry “what flag first was the goal! it would be like if we had existed first on the moon and then come to planet earth. The experience would, of Ah, but alas, there was an unintended consequence! course, be so overwhelming that we could not absorb the Pictures of our earth beamed back from the moon fired up impact of the earth’s beauty!” the public’s imagination and brought forth the first Earth Day, plus environmental regulations to protect our planet Indeed! What would we make of the great diversity of life from ourselves. flying, swimming, running, mating, birthing, breathing, being…? And had we just happened to land on the rim of a And down through the decades, NASA has tracked and grand chasm that lays the earth open like a book, would we documented the changes being caused by human impact be able to see beyond the familiar-feeling rocky landscape on earth’s natural systems. Astronauts have reported and read the epochs of life’s evolution embedded in those on the receding glaciers, expanding deserts, changing layers of stone? coastlines, raging wildfires…and tried to warn us. And now things are so critical that the current government Would we, as ‘lunans,’ stand still in awe as gravity held threatens to cut NASA’s funding if it doesn’t focus more our feet to earth’s surface, be amazed at what its force on space than on home base. has brought forth: the sound of coyotes carried in on the wind, the sight of condors soaring overhead, the feel a When I ask my partner why the moon isn’t more like brachiopod under our fingers, the taste of a pine nut, the the earth if it’s just a blasted-off part of us, he patiently scent of incoming rain? explains that the moon’s small size means that it doesn’t have enough gravity to hold onto a protective atmosphere. What would our response have been? Would we have And without that, life can’t take hold: there’s too much embraced the mindset of early earth humans who let awe radiation from our sun. hold human greed in check, or would we hone in on the modern arrogance that plunders earth’s resources, destroys Yet this is the precious atmosphere we’re messing with! existing ecosystems, and in the process turning earth’s “It’s not rocket science!,” my exasperated partner wants to wonder into a wasteland reflective of the moon? yell at the deniers who deliberately delay and then block all efforts to address the oncoming climate catastrophe: Perhaps our lunan reaction would be one of such gratitude “Burning fossil fuels releases CO2 into the atmosphere. that the grace of gravity would become gracias, one of the This thickens the blanket that protects the earth from the many human words for thank you. sun’s radiation. Then the trapped heat warms the earth. So stop the burning! Period!!” In fact, what if our gratitude for gravity could create a whole new species, one that is both human and lunan! We both have rooftop solar on our homes, and drive an In a way, that’s exactly what Thomas Berry urged: “The electric car on solar power. There really are clean energy historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human… alternatives to coal, gas, and oil, as increasing numbers at the species level, with critical reflection, within the of people are realizing. We know if we don’t make the community of life-forms, in a time developmental context,
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by means of story and shared dream experience” (i.e. And I’m stocking up on chewing gum ‘in case of creative imagination, vision). emergency.’
Together as a Greater Self, we could stand at the dawn of a new era, and co-create a culture in which the new human/ Gail Collins-Ranadive, MA, MFA, MDiv, has been a student of nature and human lunan will be placed within the dynamics of the planet nature for over seven decades. Through rather than the planet placed within the dynamics of the a multitude of lenses that include human. psychiatric nurse, military wife, mother of two daughters, licensed pilot, poet, Earth is the right place for love, and for the Life that volunteer educator, peace activist, interim emerged over eons until such a thing as love became minister, and grandmother of five, she possible. Can we love this life on this planet deep enough has woven her insights and experiences to protect it from those who would trash it and treat it into this environmental column and like another throwaway commodity to be left behind for eight published books, including three with Homebound Publications. Her next someplace else in space? Even if we could all just up and Homebound book is Dinosaur Dreaming; leave earth (which we can’t…that option will be only for Our Climate Moment. Also through a chosen few) count me out: the overwhelming beauty of Homebound, she’s a co-sponsor of The this planet has a truth claim upon me that is even stronger Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her than the grace of gravity. website is www.gailcollinsranadive.com.
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“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” —Leonardo da Vinci
THE BROTHERHOOD OF ART THE LIFE & THE ARTS COLUMN BY ERIC D. LEHMAN
The problem with loving art is that sometimes you don’t. As I glanced over one hundred paintings, sculptures, frames, sketchbooks, photographs, letters, and tools from Maurice and Charles Prendergast I was not impressed. The exhibit provided a wide scope of both their works, from Maurice’s paintings of Europe in the 1890s to Charles’s carvings produced four decades later in Westport, Connecticut. But after four decades enjoying art museums around America and the world, I had never heard of them. Worse, I just didn’t like their work.
Over lunch in the New Britain Museum of Art café, I mentioned this to my wife, and as usually happens, she put me on the right track. “If you just look at something closely you begin to appreciate it more,” she said. “Spend some time with it. Part of appreciation is just giving yourself time. Part is comparative.” She sipped her tea. “If I just look a little closer, I would find things in each piece that I liked.” That made sense, but what could I find to like here?
As a storyteller myself, I can’t help but have a strong connection to the stories I encounter in art museums. I don’t think I’m alone in that—our minds search naturally for story, whether it comes from knowing about the technique or process like with Jackson Pollock, or knowing about the importance of the piece in art history like the “toilet” by Marcel Duchamp. Knowing a little bit about either of these things helps especially with abstract art, which at first glance seems to have no story. Most often, though, the stories that draw us are those that come from the biography of the artist. These allow us to empathize or even identify with the artist, as in the world-famous story of Vincent van Gogh.
So at first, I tried to appreciate the Prendergasts biographically. Born in Newfoundland, brothers Charles and Maurice moved to Boston’s South End with their parents in
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1868. Unlike many brothers, they remained close friends through the galleries, sipping at the art like a vibrating throughout their lives, even as they moved from place to hummingbird. I watched her for a while, and then place, beginning with Maurice studying fine art in Paris surveyed the other museum patrons. There are a few bored while Charles learned how to make carved, decorative people in art museums, just as there are bored students wooden objects in Boston. Charles outlived his brother by in my college classrooms. But these are some of the only two decades, and his wife lived another four, helping to places you can watch the faces of other humans as they are preserve and protect their legacy. “We together were such struggling to learn, to understand, to love. a fine team,” Maurice told Charles in a letter from Venice, while recovering from prostate surgery. That teamwork is Making my way a second time around the exhibit, I tried rare among artists, to say the least, and even rarer are those to appreciate the Prendergasts in comparison to artists I that can collaborate in such a symbiotic way. The frames already knew. It was easy to see the influence of Cezanne Charles contributed to his brother’s canvases are some of in Maurice’s broad, minimal strokes and of Matisse in the the most tender and beautiful expressions of partnership numerous bright colors, which when examined closely we have in a world where the “falling out” and “rupture” should not complement each other. He made circular of artists’ friendships is more often remembered and even movements with his brush more than Cezanne did, a celebrated. technique that produces startling effects. Occasionally it did not work, such as when it gave the people on his beach As I learned more about them, I naturally began to scenes an overly “cartoony” aspect. However, both his appreciate them and understand their place in art history. colors and lively sense of action prevented this from being Charles’s hand-carved mirror frames were typical of the too problematic, and few have married people and scenery Arts and Crafts movement, something I had only recently in a more interesting way. begun to recognize. Maurice’s almost pastel-like beach scenes are the ones most identifiable at “impressionist,” But I still didn’t really like his paintings, until I moved and often the small, faceless, loosely rendered people are away from the beach scenes to pieces like The Birches or what bring color to his landscapes. But most of his work Snowscape, where a complete absence of humans helps to was more truly “post-impressionist,” similar to European focus on his unique near-abstraction of lines and strokes. counterparts like Van Gogh and Odilon Redon. In recent This was definitely an advantage to looking at such a broad decades American Impressionism has been given its due selection of one artist’s pieces. His Flowers and Poppies in a by critics and audiences, and it seems now the post- Blue Vase are lovely still-lifes, and Woman in Green Dress impressionists’ turn to shine. and Portrait of a Young Girl are built with thick, obvious strokes of paint, demonstrating how suited his technique In fact, I had recently been to four exhibits like this at was to larger portraiture, possibly more than to the earlier “secondary” art museums across the country, and had beach scenes. These paintings I really liked, if not loved. noticed American post-impressionists taking their rightful place next to their European counterparts on the walls Perhaps that was only my personal preference. Art of first-tier museums. As a historian myself, I found it appreciation is idiosyncratic, and I had learned long ago exciting that these artists were being rediscovered and never to let a critic or even a friend tell me what to like, reclaimed, and that their contributions were no longer or worse, what not to like. Though we love visiting art being ignored in favour of more well-known giants. That museums together, my wife and I often disagree about our fact alone made me happy, both as a citizen of America and experiences there. For example, she has more admiration as a lover of art. for the emotion or thoughts that a painting produces in her, and is moved by someone like Mark Rothko more After my first walk around the exhibit, I took a break than I am. I usually find emotion either in the gloriously and sat in the foyer of the exhibit listening to music with anthemic or the tear-jerking absurd. my eyes closed for a little while. My eyes were tired, but so was my brain. You must take breaks to let your mind But I tried to look through my wife’s eyes, and in that way, absorb the art, to allow your eyes to adjust to new realities. Charles Prendergast moved me emotionally far more than My wife took a different approach, not yet halfway his brother. His carved wooden objects were not the sort of
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art I usually responded to, but I found myself drawn to a historical movements, about the logic and emotion of lovingly rendered angel worthy of a medieval sculptor. His various works of art. But another part is simply the joy of carved panel paintings seemed located at some juncture paying attention. As the Prendergast brothers surely knew, of ancient Etruscan art and Paul Gaugin, with the most understanding takes time, and so does love. successful being Donkey Rider, delightful in its whimsy and touching in its motifs. I found myself grinning at its Eric D. Lehman teaches creative writing and literature at the University small, odd charm. of Bridgeport and his work has been published in dozens of journals and As we left the New Britain Museum of Art, I commented magazines. He is the author of fifteen on how glad I was to learn something. And as I said it, books, including Afoot in Connecticut, I realized that the knowledge was not only about art. I Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold had spent time and looked closely, finding certain things and the Burning of New London, and that I liked, and others I did not. I had made each piece a The Quotable New Englander. His part of me, the same way I might sip a glass of bad whisky novella Shadows of Paris was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and or a cup of good coffee. Either way the result was joy. won a silver medal in romance from the Part of this joy is learning about individual artists, about Foreword Review. SECTION TWO
SMOKING ON MY DEATHBED IN CONTEMPLATION OF IMPERMANENCE & TRANSITION BY THEODORE RICHARDS
My five-year-old is, in many ways, my easiest child, And is it possible that an entire civilization could have a overall. She’s the kind of child that teachers love, the meltdown—a collective tantrum, if you will—at a time of kind of child who people won’t hesitate to watch. “Oh, transition? I’ll watch Calliope anytime!” they’ll say. She can focus easily; she’s kind; she pays attention and wants to please. *** There’s just that one problem, that moment when it all I recently turned 45. This, in itself, means little to me. goes left—the transition. When it’s time to go, she might Physically, I feel more or less the same as I did ten years have a meltdown. When it’s time for bed, she might have ago. But I have noticed, recently, that this has been a a meltdown. When it’s time for a bath, she might have a time full of surprising changes, changes for which I really meltdown. was never prepared. I am, like Dante in the famous lines in the beginning of the entering the “ When it’s time to get out of the bath, she might have a Commedia, selva meltdown. oscura”—the dark wood—in “il mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”—the middle of life’s journey. Most parents will recognize this. It isn’t a shock. After all, many young children have trouble with transitions For me, this moment brought with it a new phase and change. But why? What is it about us—human in my work, the end of a decade of working in the beings—that makes us so troubled by change? Usually, nonprofit world running youth programs and leading we adults think of ourselves as having outgrown this an organization. I have had similar changes before—I’ve problem. But I have been wondering: Do we ever really moved many times, changed course many times—but outgrow our resistance to transition or do we simply have this felt different. I’ve reached a phase in my life where our own, grownup meltdowns on a larger scale? the stakes are higher, and where the possibilities for the future seem to have narrowed. So it brought with it a great deal of stress.
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“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” —Dylan Thomas
But the stressful times in life always seem to occur during But the situation is so dire that I wonder if it’s still even times of change. Moving. A new job. The beginning or possible. Might it be that life, or at least our species, is end of a relationship. Even when these are good things, just a blip, something like a perturbation on the quantum things we want, they bring stress. But I also wonder: how foam, inevitably fated to pass? do we collectively manage stress in times of transition? And what happens when an entire species, an entire Is it possible that humanity is impermanent, our planet, goes through a period of radical change? collective lives no different from the individual lives that we know will end? If so, how should we mourn? *** What is certain is that the destructive human civilization News of the end has been unavoidable. Each day we are of global capitalism is inevitably passing away. But we confronted with stories of burning forests, rising seas, do have a choice as to how we respond to this transition. superstorms. Ecosystems are collapsing; biodiversity is The easiest choice is to be like five-year-olds and have a crashing. collective, planetary tantrum, throwing all of our toys out The focus—understandably, I suppose—has been on how of the pram and putting fascists in power. we can save ourselves. That is, practical, technological, *** political steps to live sustainably on the planet. The harder questions, however, have to do not with the Perhaps part of the way forward is to let go a little bit of practical steps we might take—these are fairly obvious if this idea that the world is something that humans can we can muster the common sense and political will—but fix. I don’t mean to suggest that we can’t live better lives, with how we first have to transform our culture, our way less destructive lives. But perhaps rather than living our of seeing ourselves in relationship. lives as though we are here to engineer a better world,
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we, and the world, would be better served if we thought we live? Should we simply lie back on our deathbed and differently about the notion of our impermanence. light up a cigarette, knowing that we’ll die soon anyway? Or should we consider the words of Dylan Thomas?: To begin with, we tend to think of the end in terms of abstract, linear time. The Greeks—and many other cultures—had more than one word for time. Chronos Do not go gentle into that good night. was linear time; kairos represented a special time, a time Rage, rage against the dying of the light. of transformation. As Jesus says in his first words in the earliest of the gospels (Mark), “The Kairos is at hand.” *** This is a time of transformation, a time outside of linear I have two modest suggestions, somewhere between a time. This is the moment when he emerges from the tantrum and passive acceptance. First, let’s consider living water, baptized and reborn, and the cosmos above splits. for joy. I don’t mean self-indulgence, nor do I mean As Karl Jung points out, we are, like Jesus, at a moment turning away from suffering. Genuine joy requires us to of kairos. live more fully, more deeply, to experience the world for When I worked for a Danish NGO in Zimbabwe, there all its messiness and suffering. was a strict schedule set for the adult literacy lessons I Second, I think that the thing we all crave—the thing that taught. Participants were expected to learn English and actually does endure—is not some abstract, disembodied math at precisely 9:00 and 1:00. But there was a problem: permanence, nor is it some shallow, materialistic we were living in a place without clocks, without even the permanence through the Capitalist consumption. I think concept of linear time. Time and events were intimately we all yearn for community, to experience the world as our interrelated. People vaguely knew what 1:00 was—they selves, our selves as the world. knew that it happened after the crops had been tended, the water fetched, the children fed. The notion that it In this way, it is possible to fall in love with the world, could come on its own, abstractly, was an absurdity. even in a time of transition. In this way, we might learn But this wasn’t simply about scheduling. Nor were the to live in the world in such a way that we don’t need to lessons merely about English or math. This, like most consume it, destroy it. We might just survive as a species. development aid, was about integrating people into the And even if we don’t, nothing lasts forever—individuals, Capitalist order. Abstract time allows one to show up to species, planets. Resting in the joy of this beautiful world work, to sells one’s time. we share—for this moment, this little blip of existence that is both fleeting and forever—can help us through We know now, through modern science, that time doesn’t the hard times. Even bath time. move along in this linear way. Time and events are intimately linked. And there is really no such thing as a universal, abstract time. Time differs depending on one’s Theodore Richards (www. place in the Universe. theodorerichards.com) the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project So we also must ask the question: what does this say about and the author of seven books and impermanence? What does this say about my own death? numerous literary awards, including The death of our species? two Independent Book Awards and two Nautilus Book Awards. His most recent In some Buddhist traditions, our individual book is A Letter to My Daughters: consciousness is depicted as a wave on the universal sea Remembering the Lost Dimension & the Texture of Life. He lives on the south of consciousness. We can become attached to our selves— side of Chicago with his wife and three the individual wave—or recognize that we are simply a daughters. fluctuation in a greater sea of reality.
What does endure? If our death and destruction—both individually and collectively—are imminent, how should
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BELONGING TO THE LAND | THE WAYFARER A CONVERSATION WITH STEPHEN TRIMBLE BY L.M. BROWNING
Stephen Trimble tells stories—in words and consultant and writer for the conservation commu- photographs—about the land and people of the nity, including a year with The Nature Conservancy’s West. Trimble has taught in the Honors College and Colorado Plateau Conservation Initiative and a collab- Environmental Humanities program at the University oration with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance of Utah and spent a year as a Wallace Stegner as editor of a white paper to support the protection of Centennial Fellow at the University of Utah’s Tanner Greater Canyonlands. In a landmark effort by writers Humanities Center. Steve was born in Denver, his fami- hoping to sway public policy, Trimble co-compiled ly’s base for roaming the West with his geologist father. (with Terry Tempest Williams) the essay collection, After a liberal arts education at Colorado College, he Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of worked as a park ranger in Colorado and Utah, earned a Utah Wilderness. On March 27, 1996, Senator Russ master’s degree in ecology at the University of Arizona, Feingold (D-WI) read Trimble’s essay from Testimony served as director of the Museum of Northern Arizona on the floor of the United States Senate during his plea Press, and for five years lived near San Ildefonso to protect Utah wilderness. Feingold concluded with, Pueblo in northern New Mexico. Steve often serves as a “That short piece of writing is so powerful…because
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it is a timeless statement about how people feel about A list of unvisited parks I yearned to see. A sense that natural places.” the mountain men and fur trappers had been here not so long before me. An assumption that road trips were Leslie: Welcome, Stephen. Thank you for making space the first choice whenever any free time came along. to speak with me. If one steps back and looks at the And a course at Colorado Outward Bound—my high breadth of your work thus far, the signature of your per- school graduation present—that took me deep into the spective would undoubtedly be rooted in the intersection Snowmass Wilderness. of the landscape and cultural significance of the West. You speak from a place of authority on ecology and cul- In my college years, I took all this prep and became an ture, yet all this must have begun with a pivotal moment independent actor. Taking my father’s lead, I organized or realization that made you fall in love with and find my little band of friends to venture out on trips and purpose in these subjects. Where did this journey into hikes and funky mountaineering efforts all over the the wild begin for you? West. These journeys led directly to my work as a writer Stephen: Whenever I trace my journey, I begin with and photographer. my father. The pivotal event that propelled me on this Leslie: During those early phases wherein we are still course of engaging with the land wasn’t just a “mo- trying to find our way and our purpose, many of us are ment” but the first seventeen years of my life. fortunate enough to have a mentor who guides us in My dad, Don Trimble, grew up in the West, in the lee our convictions, be it a flesh-and-blood teacher by our of Mount Rainier in Washington’s Yakima Valley. He side or one whose voice echoes down the ages in art and climbed the big Cascade volcanoes as a Boy Scout out- literature. Who were your mentors? fitted with hobnail boots and a Trapper Nelson wood- Stephen: I’ve had extraordinary teachers, generous men- framed pack. He chose his profession—field geologist tors, and pivotal models. A high school English teacher with the US Geological Survey—so he could spend time who insisted we turn loose our imaginations. A Bureau outside. of Land Management biologist who was the first true Each summer, my dad, my mom, and I would leave our editor I encountered, the first reader to rip to shreds my home in Denver and head west for my father’s field wordy and passive writing and ask me to reconstruct my season. We rented homes in whatever Oregon or Idaho paragraphs with action, concision, and clarity. town lay closest to the quadrangle Dad was mapping. My ecology professor at Colorado College, Dick And on these road trips, my father kept up a running Beidleman, taught me to pay attention. And this, as commentary about what we saw out the window. The Mary Oliver said in her beautifully concise way, is the stories of Lewis and Clark and the Oregon Trail. The key to good work. This, from Oliver’s “Sometimes”: big-picture geography of the West. Maps—always— were guideposts to our experiences and understand- “Instructions for living a life: ing. I’ve called maps our family scripture, and it’s no Pay attention. exaggeration. Be astonished. I grew up seeing the landscape as a place with endlessly rich content, a place to learn from, to revel in. How Tell about it.” best to learn more? From books. For presents my The great nature writer Ann Zwinger was the first writer father asked for Bernard DeVoto, A.B. Guthrie, David I met on equal ground. I was a junior in college and had Lavender—the great writers and historians of the West. published only a couple of mini-essays, but Ann—a These books stayed in our home, and eventually I read generation older than me—treated me as her peer. We them, too. remained friends for the rest of her life. In my thirties, I So I went off to college with a bedrock familiarity with was privileged to spend some time with Barry Lopez, who the entire West. A checklist of national parks I’d visited. encouraged me to take myself more seriously as a writer.
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Like all of us who do creative work, I’ve had more distant mentors. I’m in awe of those writers who consistently combine impeccable research, self-deprecatory humor, and glorious and exuberant language. Ellen Meloy and Annie Dillard come to mind.
Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner educated and inspired me through their books. I read Desert Solitaire in college just a couple of years after the book was published, and two years later I was a park ranger myself at Arches National Park. I read Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian while continuing to work as a ranger on the Colorado Plateau in my twenties and had pretty much the same reaction described by Bruce Babbitt when he read Stegner’s wise meditation on John Wesley Powell and the core truths of the West:
“…it was as though someone had thrown a rock through the window. Stegner showed us the limi- tations of aridity and the need for human institu- tions to respond in a cooperative way. He provided me in that moment with a way of thinking about the American West, the importance of finding true partnership between human beings and the land.” showed me how to graphically revel in emo- tion and color. I also need to acknowledge the dozens of Native people I’ve interviewed for my projects in Southwest Indian Country, be- Eliot Porter’s and Philip Hyde’s photographs ginning in 1984, when I worked on a slide show and book about in the Sierra Club’s “battle books”—creat- contemporary Native people (Our Voices, Our Land) for The ed by Sierra Club executive director David Heard Museum in Phoenix. I’ve had the honor of listening to Brower in the 1960s and ‘70s to fight con- members of 50 Native nations in the Southwest over many years. servation battles—served as models forever They taught me about belonging to the land—our home—and after. Photos could change minds, inspire added a spiritual dimension to my relationship with this home action, effect policy—and save wildlands. landscape. And so I just keep striving to take better Leslie: Evoking an appreciation for the natural world not only pictures. in your written works but your photography, you take us by the Three images come to mind. . . . hand and lead us through a wild doorway of magical landscapes. How did you first find your way into photography and what are 1. I lived and worked at Colorado’s Great some of the images in your portfolio that stand out in your memo- Sand Dunes National Park when I was 23. ry as life-changing moments? That year as a seasonal park ranger led to my first “book” ( Stephen: My dad gave me one of his old cameras when I was Great Sand Dunes: the shape —and still in print!). The nine, and he critiqued my first efforts at snapshots. By the time I of the wind, 1975 assignment (from a trusting park superin- was in college, I photographed my travels, backpacking journeys, tendent) to create the park’s first 32-page and mountain climbs—to make them real, to share my stories. I general interpretive booklet challenged learned about design and light from poring over the work of the me for the first time to crisply capture the great photographers. Ernst Haas, in his 1971 book, The Creation, spirit of a place in words and photographs.
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I photographed intensely, wandering the park alone place, and published The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural with my camera—paying attention. This opportuni- History of the Great Basin in 1989. ty—and this place—launched me into my lifework. I’ve returned to update the book over the years, and this I fell in love with the unvisited space and silence of the picture comes from one of these more recent trips to Great Basin, and I’ve now lived in this desert, in Salt the highest sand dunes in North America, rising below Lake City, for more than thirty years. Fieldwork for the the 14,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Range. book took me to remarkable places, and I’ve returned many times with my family. This photo of an autumn 2. When a publisher friend asked me to photograph for super-moon rising through an ancient Great Basin the University of Nevada Press’s Great Basin Natural bristlecone pine snag at sunset comes from one of these History Series and to write the introductory volume, power spots, The Table, high on Mount Moriah in I knew little about the Great Basin Desert. This new Nevada’s Snake Range. I still feel like the Great Basin is territory wasn’t a single national park but an immense my private playground. bioregion stretching across the entire Intermountain West. Like so many of us, I’d driven I-80 and US 3. Lastly, this photograph of Jeannette Larzelere at the Highway 50 across the roller-coaster of basins and rang- climax of her Apache girl’s coming-of-age ceremony. es, but I hadn’t ventured beyond, into the backcountry. I’ve often described this as the best photograph I’ve I began criss-crossing the Great Basin, learning this new taken. I was photographing for The Heard Museum
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project in 1984 (mentioned above) when I spent four We non-Native people romanticize Indigenous people days watching as the entire village of Whiteriver, while racism continues. We freeze them in 1880, a Arizona, surrounded Jeannette with respect and love, “vanishing people” with a “lost” culture. But of course dancing her into adulthood. Native people are just that—people, with an enduring and vital identity. And every missing act of empathy I have never seen anything more moving. costs all of us, both Native and non-Native. Everyone This picture captures what well may be the most impor- loses out on mutual understanding, resonance, connec- tant, most sacred event in this girl’s life. On the last day tion, respect. of the ceremony, a young man dips an eagle feather and a Several weeks after the ceremony, I saw Jeannette spray of sage in a basket filled with clay dissolved in wa- Larzelere walking in jeans and a t-shirt at the White ter. He covers the kneeling initiate with this earth paint, Mountain Apache Tribal Fair. She still looked transfig- to give her the power of the earth, to keep her strong ured. I’m sure she retains a little of that strength today, through a long life. With this clay, she acquires the pow- all these years later. She will need it. er of Changing Woman, the great Apache heroine. Leslie: Your support on behalf of the landscape is one An entire Apache village gave unspoken permission for that is deeply connected to your home region of Utah. me to photograph this intimate moment. In exchange In December of 2016, President Obama declared for this honor, I bear the responsibility of an ally.
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1.35-million-acres in southeast Utah Bears Ears commitment to publish a trade edition after initial National Monument. From the nationally-acclaimed distribution of a chapbook in the circles of power in soapbox of the Los Angeles Times editorial page, you Washington, D.C. With a bow toward the original had the chance to thank President Obama for his Testimony, we called our chapbook of essays and poems actions. Red Rock Testimony. We titled the expanded trade ver- sion Red Rock Stories. In the wake of the 2016 election, you’ve had to move from celebration to defense as the Trump adminis- We gathered a chorus of 35 writers whose lives span tration’s merciless move against the public lands and nine decades, a montage of poems and essays that environmental protections. Taking central focus on includes Native and Hispanic voices, warnings from Obama’s provisions, Trump signed an executive order elders and challenges from millennials, personal emo- gutting both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. tional journeys, and lyrical nature writing. These pieces You’ve been on the frontlines of the battle for Bears address historical context, natural history and archae- Ears, tell us about your actions and give us insight into ology, energy threats, faith, and politics. Together, they the cross-section of issues at the heart of this matter (i.e.: offer a nuanced case for restraint and respect in this racism, the perspectives of the Native American tribes, incomparable redrock landscape. politics, corporate interests). In June 2016 Kirsten Allen and I took our cartons of Stephen: At the beginning of 2016, a whirlwind of books to Washington D.C. We distributed copies to threats to public lands surfaced in western wildlands. decision makers—to staffers at all levels in the land In response, the Salt Lake City writing community management agencies, to the President’s Council on began to meet—all of us ready to leap into the long Environmental Quality, and to a few key members of tradition of writing in support of conservation. Congress. Shortly afterward, we sent the book to every member of Congress with a rousing cover letter from We had one remarkable campaign to support, the un- Bruce Babbitt. paralleled Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition proposal. Five Southwestern Native nations had asked President We hope the book reached the hands and hearts of the Obama to proclaim a national monument on 1.9 Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and of Barack million acres in southeast Utah, to protect extraordi- Obama. We hope these words helped to inspire their nary sacred lands from archaeological vandalism and decision to proclaim the innovative 1.35-million-acre destructive energy development. The tribes asked for Bears Ears National Monument during the president’s co-management of the Bears Ears, honoring traditional last month in office. knowledge along with western science. Of course President Obama’s visionary act of conserva- As writers, we asked: how can we effectively participate tion had no time to mature before the current president in these conversations, support the tribes, and affect eviscerated the new national monument with his own these decisions with our essays and poems and stories? executive order, shrinking the boundaries of Bears Ears by 85 percent. A coalition of Native nations and conser- Our concerned group of citizen-writers had a powerful vationists has challenged his action in court. model, a book that Terry Tempest Williams and I created at a similar moment of crisis in 1995, Testimony: The tribes show remarkable grace and patience as Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah politicians act with ignorance and arrogance. As Wilderness. And so, with this 2016 round of attacks on Trump barreled towards his disastrous proclamation, public lands—and the promise of the Bears Ears monu- the Inter-Tribal Coalition explained the essence of the ment—the Utah writing community concluded that we monument: “The Bears Ears region is not a series of iso- needed a “Testimony II.” lated objects, but the object itself, a connected, living landscape, where the place, not a collection of items, Kirsten Johanna Allen, publisher of Utah’s nonprofit must be protected.” Torrey House Press, asked me to edit and made the
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“Our belief in our community—human, animal, plant, desert, mountain, stars above—will prevail and sustain us.
“Now we know what we must do, a line from a Pueblo song. The land shall endure. There will be victory. The land will go on. We shall have victory.” –Simon Ortiz, Acoma Pueblo poet and contributor to Red Rock Stories
The first step toward redemption came with the elec- Leslie: Your range of ability cannot be denied, your tion results of November 2018, when for the first time knowledge never seems stretched beyond its limit, wheth- in history, two of the three commissioners in San Juan er you’re looking through the lens of a camera, penning County, Utah (which encompasses Bears Ears) will be op-eds, or crafting pieces on culture and landscape. It is Diné, members of the Navajo Nation. easy to see why you were recently named one of Utah’s “15 Most Influential Artists” by Artists of Utah/15 Donald Trump also attacked Grand Staircase-Escalante Bytes Magazine; however, you’ve ventured inward into National Monument. Though this preserve has been an even more personal space in the book project, Leave around for a generation, the president catered to the Me Alone Forever. The piece explores how mental angry anti-Federalist elected officials of Utah who illness has touched your family and ultimately takes dream of coalmine riches. Trump reduced the monu- a deeper dive into the woefully inadequate mental ment by half. healthcare system. As an author of a radically authentic These days I’m devoting most of my conservation personal essay on a struggle with mental illness, I know energy to defending Grand Staircase. I’m on the board the challenges of bringing such intimate details out into of Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners, the lead plaintiff the world. Tell us a little of your family’s struggle with in the lawsuit to restore the monument. I’m cautiously mental illness. What progression of events and realiza- hopeful we’ll prevail in the courts. tions brought you into the mind-space of wanting to tell this story? Acoma Pueblo poet (and contributor to Red Rock Stephen: My mother divorced an abusive first hus- Stories) Simon Ortiz agrees, and reassures allies with these wise words: band after a one-year mistake of a bad marriage at 20, in 1942. But when she moved on, her newborn son, “Our belief in our community—human, animal, plant, Michael, came with her. Five years later she married my desert, mountain, stars above—will prevail and sustain father, who adopted Mike. I came along when Mike was us. eight.
“Now we know what we must do, a line from a Pueblo Sweet as a kid, Mike was diagnosed as “retarded,” the song. The land shall endure. There will be victory. The acceptable word in those days. But in 1957, rage and land will go on. We shall have victory.” psychosis overwhelmed him and threatened our family.
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His new diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia, capable of lost soul of a son into the shadows of America’s appall- violence. Our parents had no choice but to seek Mike’s ing response to mental illness, into the dark recesses commitment to the Colorado State Hospital. I was six. of our family, and behind the doors I’ve barricaded in Mike was 14. He never lived at home again. myself.
Mike’s life mirrored the history of our treatment of This time, when I look into my brother’s eyes, I will mental illness in America in the second half of the not look away. And so I’m working away on a book twentieth century. He spent nine years in Colorado about Mike, honoring his life and striving for the mental institutions. When he was mainstreamed back empathy I was too young and unformed to feel when he to Denver, he rejected our family. Ten years later, he was alive. died in 1976 in a Denver boarding home, and his body wasn’t discovered for three days. The Denver Post used Leslie: As one who suffers under the labels of mental his lonely death as a hook to expose these poorly man- illness and has been confronted by the stigma’s around aged warehouses for people with mental illness. This such struggles, I feel a swell of gratitude for what you’re brutal publicity exponentially amplified my mother’s doing. grief and guilt. . . . A question we all seem to be asking ourselves in My mother saved the agonizing newspaper stories about this age of crisis-fatigue and mounting urgency is: How his death in an envelope with old court documents, do we keep fighting the good fight in the face of rising hospital records, and Mike’s letters. That file, along political pushback. How do you keep going after all these with an artifact or two and a scatter of photos in our years of struggle and setback on behalf of the land? family albums, was all that remained from my brother’s Stephen: When Trump was elected, I asked myself the difficult life. Mom hated talking about Mike, whose same question The Wayfarer asks in every issue: how story only brought her heartbreak. And I avoided any do we create change? And in this moment, I figure my thoughts of Mike beyond the most superficial. “I had contribution is to write. Op-eds reach the most peo- an older brother—a half-brother—who left home when ple—quickly, in real time, so different from working I was six. He was diagnosed sequentially as retarded, on books for years. That’s what I’ve concentrated on, schizophrenic, and epileptic. He died many years ago.” along with the everyday actions of any engaged citi- I carried fear and shame about my brother, just as zen, attending protests, calling members of congress, nationally we carry these same feelings of disgust and canvassing for good candidates. Taking action feels so discomfort about mental illness—what one psychiatrist much healthier than staying home and whining and calls “primal fear.” Many years ago, when Mike reject- wailing. ed us, when he wrote to our mother, “leave me alone In between rallies and protests and hearings, I make forever,” I felt relief. time to walk in the sun, on the earth. The Bears Ears I want to do better. tribes speak often of healing, and we surely find this in our revisits to the wild and our revels in community. Mike, the defining tragedy of our mother’s life, has long been gone. My mother and father are gone. No Leslie: Finally, what’s next on the horizon with regard one survives to tell me the stories I need to hear in to your work? order to resurrect the details of Mike’s life. But, as a Stephen: I worked on a novel for several years in the starter, I have the “Mike File.” 1990s but didn’t have the chops to finish it. I am eager It took me a year of distance from my father’s death to to go back and get it right. open the envelope. It feels incendiary. But, finally, I open the clasp and spill the contents onto my desk. For the first time, I’m ready to grapple with Mike’s life and death and to follow the story of our mother and her
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ESSAYS
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” —Philip Pullman
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A BAKER’S DOZEN OF WAYS TO ENDURE MARCH IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
or school. Some escape, retreating to warmer, sunnier BY IRIS GRAVILLE climates, returning in April with their skin tinged pink or darker brown. Hail salted our back deck on Palm Sunday last year. It nicked my cheeks as I dashed to the car, clutching Most years, I stay put. Rain drips off my hood on walks the wool scarf wound around my neck. The next morning, with my dog. I spend many hours curled in a chair by gray skies again released a curtain of rain, pooling in the the wood stove, a cat purring on my lap as I make my already-waterlogged yard. Flipping the calendar to April way through the teetering stack of books I neglected in couldn’t come too soon for me. previous months. Some days I wear fingerless gloves as I write in my journal or tap my laptop keyboard. A shot of March, in this upper left corner of the United States, single malt Scotch before dinner, or a glass of port after, torments me with its fickle combination of all raises my internal thermostat. Best of all, I give in to the four seasons; I think of it as its own time of year— season’s permission—perhaps mandate—to turn inward. fawintsprisum. Don’t get me wrong. One of the many reasons I love living in the Pacific Northwest, particularly Late sunrises and early sunsets, shuttered shops and this region on the Salish Sea, is its climate. We’re blessed restaurants, and the hibernating garden support the with distinct seasons, but temperatures year-round contemplative mood that often eludes me other times of generally fall in the range of low 40s to upper 60s. We the year. The pressure to accomplish eases, opening empty experience just enough cold (and a day or two of snow) in moments—even hours—for reflection and daydreaming. the winter; crisp, sunny days in the fall; bursts of color and birdsong in the spring; and enough warmth on summer Although I’m comforted by the gray, wet, Pacific days to shed sweaters and polar fleece—at least until Northwest winter, my contentment never quite lasts until sundown. More than once I’ve worn wool gloves and hat spring. When I’ve reached my limit of damp and dreary, I to watch Fourth of July fireworks. draw on a Baker’s Dozen* of ideas to sustain me through the last days of March; feel free to try any of them (or add I genuinely enjoy what winter brings to my small, rural a few of your own) if you find yourself struggling when island—a slower pace with fewer tourists and events, winter oozes into spring. candle glow many hours of the day, hearty stews and soups, snuggling under a hand-woven afghan. I know not all my neighbors indulge in or enjoy such semi-hibernation, though. Many tend sheep and cattle in the muck or scrape windshields and dodge flooded potholes to get to work
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“. . .Baker’s Dozen* of ideas to sustain me through the last days of March.”
1. Toss another log on the fire and drink a second cup 10. Celebrate that March in the Pacific Northwest of coffee. doesn’t (usually) include snow.
2. Listen for the rhythm when hail tap dances across 11. Remind yourself that it’s the rain that keeps firs the wooden deck. and cedars, well, evergreen.
3. Slip on rain boots and stomp through four, five, 12. Look at the world through rain-splattered glasses. sixteen puddles. 13. Make a baker’s dozen of chocolate chip cookies. 4. Look lovingly at the garden spade, rake, and trowel, relieved you don’t need a snow shovel. In March, a trip to the compost bin is like walking on a field of saturated kitchen sponges. But one day, it will turn 5. Don’t apologize for wearing long underwear to a firm and dry (at least most of the time). Until then, I’ll Spring Equinox party. make my way through my baker’s dozen. For now, excuse me as I search for my sunglasses. 6. Feel gratitude for a roof over your head, a car with a working heater, and a sump pump in the crawl *Most people likely know that a “Baker’s Dozen” equals space. thirteen. But do you know why? I put the question to “the great oracle” (Google), and learned the most likely 7. Locate sunglasses so you’ll know where they are explanation relates to medieval laws when bread was when the sun unexpectedly shines longer than fifteen sold by weight. Bakers who short-weighted customers minutes. encountered strict punishment (fines; flogging; an ear nailed to the bakery door; a hand severed), so they avoided 8. Take a ferry ride for a change of scenery—from these dire consequences by adding an extra to a dozen. green and gray to… gray and green.
9. Remind yourself that when it’s cloudy and rainy, dirt streaks and the dog’s nose smudges aren’t visible on the windows.
Iris Graville is the author of three nonfiction books: Hands at Work, BOUNTY, and a memoir, Hiking Naked. She lives on Lopez Island, WA where she publishes SHARK REEF Literary Magazine, writes essays and blogs, and teaches. Sometimes you’ll find her on the interisland ferry, working on a new essay collection about the Salish Sea, climate change, and Washington State Ferries. irisgraville.com.
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“God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.” –John Muir
THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
BY WILLIAM HUGGINS Last night as the sun’s rays ebbed, while my daughter and I watched Venus emerge, leading the star parade in our Three nights in a row coyotes wake me. In our tent, the expansive Nevada sky, the coyotes again set up a howl. thin membrane that allegedly protects us from the wild They started to the northeast and southwest of us, carrying outside, my wife and daughter and three rescue dogs on all night, voices drawing a circle around our human slept through the howls. Several times I fell back to sleep, enclave, cries of joy and maybe defiance. Dangerous as it briefly, only to rise with heart pounding to their wild calls. is to anthropomorphize, I always hear coyotes’ whooping They ran and sang at least a mile away, carried on the cool howls as an act of insubordination to human development, night air, moving counter-clockwise around us. human ambitions. A kind of feral, We’re still here. I slept fitfully but well as they broke my sleep with their calls for Once, half-awake, at the edge of a dream, I thought they another night. were calling to me. Perhaps they were. Only they know. Truth is, they wake something deeper inside me. Now I hang in a hammock between two piñon pines, a light breeze moving over me, fine morning hike behind I’m out here with family to enjoy our public lands. I find our crew. I scribble in my journal. There’s something about it pointless to work to defend something and not spend a hammock after a good, long walk—life elevated, but not time there—I’m no armchair social media slacktivist. I in the sense of a silly hashtag. A respite well earned, with a stand for what I stand on, as some say. I’m out on the view. land as much as possible. In the summertime that means heading for the hills and woods to get away from southern Our Forest Service campground soothes, relatively silent. Nevada’s broiling heat. On our walk in the dry, pine-laden Of the fifteen sites in our circle, only three are occupied. morning air, we caught the view from a ridge approaching The quiet would be a bit more comforting without my Ward Mountain: to the west the landscape was occluded by 5 ½-year old daughter playing with her dolls and body- smoke from California’s wildfires. A fifty-mile vista hidden slamming the hammock every once in a while, still full of in haze. Our current Secretary of the Interior blames these energy even after a 5-mile hike above 9,000’. But this is her fires on “extreme environmentalists” (Canon). I would wild place, too. It’s a tried-but-truism to say we protect laugh if the rhetoric weren’t so precarious: like coyotes, these open spaces for coming generations, a sentiment I those of us who speak up for the land are being singled out like except that it ignores the obvious reality that there are as dangerous. All around the American West our National other beings here, as well, just beginning their feral life Forests burned well past when they normally do, and the journeys. Some we see, most we don’t. This space might be only climate not changing is the one in Washington, DC. our playground, but it’s their home. In this challenging political moment and assault on our
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treasured public lands, I think we could all take a cue from lands, especially in dry climates like the southwest: roads, the coyote: make our voices heard for these landscapes clearcuts, cryptogamic soil disruption, oil and natural gas we love and use. Be wild. Be loud. Be proud. If loving the development, mining—scars in desert ecosystems that can land is considered extreme, then be extreme: let voices of take a hundred years or more to heal. joy flood the offices of those suit-bound politicians who spend too much time in air conditioning. No, thanks. I’ll keep my open space public, please—for all of us, human and not. But we need to get out on the land, too. Remember what connects us. Wild Nevada calls me, and whenever I can I So far as forest policy goes, the economic arguments of the answer. I live in the desert but I’m addicted to mountains. past don’t make sense any longer. In 2016, for example, Some ranges in Nevada house the oldest living things on the outdoor recreation industry “made up 2 percent of the the planet: bristlecone pines, gnarled, twisted beings that national GDP—more than mining, oil and gas extraction 2 can live over 3,000 years. They’ve lived through changes combined.” Here in my own state of Nevada, outdoor 3 before, but what’s coming might be different. Time will recreation generates 87,000 jobs, a $12.6 billion economy tell. In Nevada’s forests the air gets so dry you can smell the in its own right, with some of that feeding into state pine like it’s an aroma in your home. I rub my fingers on and local tax coffers. That’s three times more jobs than a piñon’s needles and let the smell play through my sinuses. created by the mining industry here. And perhaps more importantly, those jobs are sustainable, so long as we have Wildness. healthy landscapes—potentially forever.
Though some areas are closed for military purposes, most But far more important than economics, the restorative of the rest of my state is open public land, with almost effects of time in wilderness reenlivens, reenergizes—good 3.5 million acres of Congressionally-protected capital W and necessary things in a world whose politics seem to Wilderness—which means that it is open for you, dear wear those of us who care about the health of the land reader, to explore. Many of the wilderness areas and down to the bone. I need this break to hike and hang in my National Forest campsites are free. Many Americans don’t hammock because when I get home, like many of us it’ll be even know these areas exist and, better yet, that they own time to get back on the phone and email and work to keep them. They’re yours, ours—part of the public trust, one these spaces wild and free and open. On our beautiful, of the best things about being an American. I remember lessening blue/green planet, we lose an area of forest the the words of the rapper DMX when he saw Yellowstone size of a football field every second,4 an annual total the National Park for the first time: “I had no idea any of this size of Italy. Deforestation may increase now that Brazil was even here.”1 has a President who says development of the Amazon will be a primary goal of his administration. The Amazon acts Well, it is, and I’m lucky to live close enough to be able to literally as the lungs of our planet. Worldwide, our leaders enjoy our public lands as often as my schedule allows. But can’t seem to see the forests for the trees they allow to be the rapacious forces of greed and power can never seem to sacrificed for their vision of progress. And with a future get enough to satisfy them. Two of our Nevada—“our” as planetary human population potentially pushing 9 billion in We the People’s—National Monuments may be scaled or more, who knows what environmental issues loom back from current protections, not to mention what’s before us. happening to Bear Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah next door. An entrenched resentment exists in One thing seems pretty obvious: we should keep our some Americans who already have and own too much remaining forests wild and undeveloped, from Alaska’s over the word “public,” as if it’s anti-American—and that 2 Kutz, Jessica and Dan Spinelli. “Public Lands Attacks Sway Voters.” those spaces designated “public” should by necessity and High Country News. October 29, 2018. P. 7. tradition be privatized. Many of us Westerners know too 3 Outdoor Industry Association. “Nevada Outdoor Recreation Econ- omy Report.” July 26, 2017. https://outdoorindustry.org/resource/ well what happens when private interests take over public nevada-outdoor recreation-economy-report/ 4 Carrington, Damian, Nice Commente, Pablo Guttierez, and Cath 1 Blakeslee, Nate. American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obses- Levett. “One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data sion in the West. Broadway Books, 2017. P. 40. reveals.” The Guardian. 27 June, 2018.
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Tongass to Maine’s White Mountain to my own Toiyabe macroeconomics has little patience for such pastimes. Still, here in the heart of Wild Nevada. As Americans, we can I try to impress this in my daughter: wilderness allows use our voices to keep them protected and wild. I think life here to thrive, all the diverse beings we see and hear, future generations will thank us. without much more human development than some campsites and a water tank. This morning we walked through a healthy mix of piñon, juniper, ponderosa pine, with lots of ground cover plants, Wildness and biodiversity thrive in a vigorous ecology birdsong, and signs of plenty of fauna. The day before where fearless voices cry out. Silence implies consent. In we walked under a pair of circling ravens and peregrines, order to keep what wild remains intact, let’s not be afraid turning on thermals, on the hunt. Not a climax ecosystem, to be like the coyote and make joyous calls of our own to but a reasonably healthy mix of biodiversity. And there’s any that can hear—to howl with both rage and ecstasy, let so much more that we can’t see. In his astonishing book them know we’re still here. Peter Wohlleben stresses time The Hidden Life of Trees, William Huggins lives, writes, and and again how “people rely heavily on sight, and so we works in the desert southwest with are particularly influenced by this sense….The diversity his wife and daughter. He has an MA of animal life plays out mostly in the microscopic realm, in Literature from UNLV. His short hidden from the eyes of forest visitors.” We have four days fiction and essays have appeared here, so we slow down, settle in, begin to notice what’s in multiple books, magazines, and journals. His first book, Ghosts, is around us. We need stillness and silence to learn to see and due out autumn 2019. hear with the eyes of a forest—time, deep time. Capitalist
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Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape— —Mary Oliver, “Bone”
WHAT THE SOUL IS, AND WHERE HIDDEN
BY TYRA OLSTAD I hadn’t gone looking for my soul. For thirty-seven years, I’ve been living on this earth more or less happily, never giving much thought to whether souls exist much less I know it sounds ridiculous, impossible, more than a little prowling far-flung places in search of mine. Granted, absurd, but I found the place where my soul resides. The I’m a geographer, with special interest in “place- exact location. A bit of braided delta at the end of the attachment”—the ways by which people fall in love with Nigliq Channel at the mouth of the Colville River on landscapes—and “place-identity”—the ways by which a Alaska’s North Slope; a mudflat half-submerged in the person may become so strongly attached to a location that Arctic Ocean and half-exposed on the far edge of North she or he comes to see it as a part of her or his sense of America; a piece of land so riddled with rivulets and self. But I’ve focused on psychological and socio-political pocked with sky-mirror pools that it’s more water and air dynamics rather than on spirit-searching: how people than sure, solid earth—that’s where I found my soul. develop place-identity; how we express place-attachment; Of course, you may be thinking to yourself, that’s just and what the implications are, especially in the context rhetoric, meant to imply how beautiful the landscape is of land management and wilderness preservation. “[T] or indicate how deeply it resonated with me. Even if you his is not hard to understand,” Terry Tempest Williams do believe that people have something we call “souls”, summarizes: “falling in love with a place, being in love they’re certainly not tied to any particular geography. A with a place, wanting to care for a place and see it remain ghost-world of spiritual essences doesn’t hover unseen intact as a wild piece of the planet.” around the planet, spread across every continent and sea or I, for one, am drawn to austere places—plains, deserts, coalescing around so-called vortexes. Right? tundra. I knew I’d find the Arctic beautiful. But I wasn’t That’s what I would have thought, too, until I happened expecting much more than that. It takes time to go to find my soul. Invisible, ineffable, but undeniably there, beyond immediate attraction to or surficial appreciation at that conjunction of Arctic mud, sea, and sky. for a landscape. Only after we’ve layered meanings on landforms and accumulated significant place-based **** memories can we feel a sense of rootedness. And only
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after our biography has become inextricably intertwined northern Alaska, where the pull of the ocean exposes the with our geography can we claim that where we are is muck of low tide, a lone mosquito-crazed caribou runs who we are. “[I]t goes beyond mere preference,” humanist helter-skelter, white walls of sea-ice loom far offshore, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan articulates the depth of place- and mirror-calm water reflects an infinity of clouds. identity; “the desert is my geographical double—the objective correlative of the sort of human being I am when **** the shallow, social layers are stripped away.” I hadn’t gone to the Arctic to examine the aesthetics of I realized this years ago, when I fell in love with Northern the North Slope (though I was eager to experience the Arizona’s Painted Desert—an expansive labyrinth of “Northern Great Plains”.) Nor was I there to research colorful clay hills and sandstone ledges, fossil trees and Iñupiaq perceptions of place (though, in talking with phytosaurs, petroglyphs and pottery sherds, great swaths residents, I was struck by how strongly they identify with of sagebrush, and, best of all, the biggest horizon I’d their landscape and how exponentially they’re affected ever seen. That magnificent, turquoise-skied space is by climate change and fossil fuel extraction.) Mainly, where I first learned to wander, learned to breathe, felt earlier short-term plans and longer-term dreams had fully and wholly alive. Looking back, I feel I didn’t unexpectedly fallen through, leaving me with three empty truly exist before I met the Painted Desert; but before I months, planless and dreamless. When a friend mentioned met the Painted Desert, I had no idea that I was missing that he was thinking of attempting to packraft down the anything—that a wild, sunburnt, sage-scented me hid Anaktuvuk and Colville Rivers from the Brooks Range beneath my social outer skin. to the Arctic Ocean—a journey he wasn’t quite sure was even possible—I jumped at the chance to join him. I Post-Painted Desert, I’ve focused my personal life and don’t mind mosquitoes, or being cold and wet, I told professional career on trying to experience, understand, him (not entirely honestly), and can learn to paddle. I’m and articulate the exhilaration of seemingly “empty” comfortable with extreme remoteness and can deal with landscapes—the “marginal” ecosystems and “boring” the possibility of polar bears. scenery that many people undervalue, ignore, and/ or outright malign. I see grandeur in open horizons What I didn’t tell him was that I needed remoteness, and find intrigue in subtle lifeforms, but am well- unknownness, an expedition into what is as close to aware that spaciousness isn’t photogenic, and sparseness true terra incognita as possible in the modern era. appears to offer few resources or amenities. “If you gotta Yes, it would be nice to see superlative scenery and to drill somewhere,” I was once told regarding energy encounter untouched natural splendor, but, like most development in Wyoming’s seemingly-barren Red Desert, other wilderness-goers, mostly I needed to get away from “might as well be here”. the exhaustion, trammels, and heartbreak of humanity for a while. I needed to reconnect with spaciousness and A quote (attributed to Willa Cather) that became my solitude, freedom and belonging, landscape and self. mantra: “Anybody can love mountains, but it takes soul to Unsaid to my friend: I needed to go to the Arctic to love the prairie.” remember what it’s like to feel a part of the wild world.
“Soul,” as in moral depth. As in holistic sensibility— We scrambled to arrange travel dates, get equipment, and, awareness of a place’s gestalt or, better yet, one’s own not quite as thoroughly as we ought to have, consult maps. umwelt. As in a touch of rhythm. “Soul,” from sawol, Old We planned to meet in Anaktuvuk Pass—a Nunamiut English for the “spiritual and emotional part of a person.”1 village located near the headwaters of its eponymous river in the heart of the Brooks Range—in early July, float Not “soul” as in a gasp of surprise and recognition; an one hundred thirty-five-odd miles to the confluence immediate connection with the greater world. A glimpse with the Colville, then another ninety-ish miles to the of enlightenment. “Soul” as in something and somewhere ocean. From there, we’d paddle back to village of Nuiqsut’s in me—part of my me-ness—that happens to reside in far airstrip. Thirteen days, my friend budgeted, giving us a 1 N.a., n.d. “Soul.” Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymon- few more days than strictly necessary. (I deferred to his line.com/word/soul#etymonline_v_23918 .
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judgment, as he’s relatively experienced at packrafting in landscapes are, how very tall the mountains and deep the Alaska. He chose the boat; he told me what gear to get. drainages; how rock, rivers, weather, and wildlife conspire Life jacket, drysuit, definitely a bug net. GPS? Check. to render maps useless and plans meaningless. Places Emergency satellite communication device? Check. like the Brooks Range make foolhardy visitors fight for Bear spray, air horn, flares? How I hoped we wouldn’t survival, with only our soft, breakable bodies and whatever encounter bears.) equipment we can carry to wield against pure wildness.
Anaktuvuk Pass is mostly surrounded by the roadless, By the time I managed to stumble into Anaktuvuk Pass, trailless Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve cold and crying, I was very grateful to be alive, but not in (GAAR). The only ways to get to the village are by plane an inspiring, affirming manner. I was exhausted. Cowed. or foot. My friend made plans to fly, but, as I looked at Rather than elated or a touch transcendent, I felt brittle maps and scrolled through websites, I came up with the and near-broken. Acutely mortal. hare-brained idea to hike in alone—to take a shuttle up the Dalton Highway, get dropped off close to the Arctic All this to say: I had no desire whatsoever to pack up an Divide, and make an eleven-day, seventy-plus-mile inflatable rubber boat and head north into even more solo traverse of part of the Brooks Range, some of the unknown territory; to voluntarily expose myself to rain, “ruggedy”-est, most remote mountains in the country. wind, rapids, bears, bugs, and who knows what else, all over again. Anaktuvuk Pass was my chance to ditch As soon as I began thinking of backpacking, I assumed romanticized notions of Adventure or Truth, catch a it would be a revelatory experience. “[N]o invention, no flight back to civilization, and return to my quiet little brilliant thought which the modern world ha[s] to offer house in a quiet little town in a place that gives me no joy c[an] provide half the elation of…days spent in the little- but that also isn’t likely to swallow me whole. explored, uninhabited world of the arctic wilderness,” Bob Marshall promises, “Out there—in a place where Of course, the raft trip would be different. We didn’t the mountains are “sharp,” “colossal,” and seem “to rise really know what to expect (especially on the Anaktuvuk), infinitely into a world beyond the world”—surely, I’d but I shouldn’t have to lug around my backpack or cross find “peace and strength and immensity and coordination any mountains. Moreover, it would be safer and not and freedom.”. Day after day, with no one to talk to nearly so lonely with two of us. My friend has trained and nothing to think about but the terrain, the wildlife, as a Wilderness First Responder and, at least, would be and the nightless summer-in-the-Arctic skies, I might capable of activating the emergency beacon if anything even find “the familiar sense of expansiveness, of deep went terribly wrong. With him there, my thoughts exhilaration…summed up in a single Eskimo word: wouldn’t have to rattle and reverberate around my own quviannikumut, ‘to feel deeply happy’” head; moments would accumulate in his memory as well as mine. He’s the only person I know who’d propose this Praeter solitudinem nihil video—“I saw nothing but packrafting expedition, much less let me tag along. solitude,” Barry Lopez writes, quoting an early Arctic explorer. Eleven days of misery, exhaustion, and terror, How could I not go? After two short but pleasant days in steeped in beauty and punctuated by occasional awe. town, safe and warm, we packed up and headed off, aiming Interminable hours of snow-swept mountain passes, for a little lake near the Arctic Divide which we hoped rain-swollen rivers, ankle-twisting tussocks, disorienting would connect with the rivers, the ocean; adventure, joy. wind and fog, ubiquitous mosquitoes, and explosions **** of wildflowers. Although I’d been to Alaska several times—my friend and I had met while working at Denali It began with a rill—a trickle weaving through the National Park six years earlier, him as a backcountry tundra, crystal-clear to the cobblestone bottom, barely ranger, me as a paleontology technician—I’d never been wide enough to fit the raft. I thought the rill would get that far north, nor that alone, for so long. Moreover, swallowed by sedges, but instead it picked up a current, I’d forgotten and underestimated just how big Alaskan widened around corners, and carried us through to the
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lake; from there, the river. We were flowing, on our way— Of course, that ill-advised, overeager trip had begun with all the way to the end, as we’d told an astounded village a flight to Fairbanks and, before that, purchase of a ticket resident. to Fairbanks. Discussions about dates and gear. Mention of the possibility of packrafting, entertainment of the Or maybe it began when we left Anaktuvuk Pass earlier possibility; the decisive moment when I hit “send” on an that afternoon, heading down the gravel road to the email reading “I’m in.” landfill, then out across the tundra. While we deliberated how best to pack and inflate the raft, the sky alternately Leading up to that, the collapse of other plans, preceded crumpled with clouds and broke into sunshine—was that a by the ascent of hopes. Years mired in a meaningful but glimmer of rainbow? Were we really doing this? demanding job, far from my beloved plains.
Then again, maybe it had begun days earlier, when Or had it begun with a copy of Barry Lopez’s Arctic I’d trudged across Ernie Pass and gazed into the icy Dreams? Picked up sometime in college, first read while headwaters of the Anaktuvuk, relieved to reach the final working in southwestern Wyoming. (Scribbled in the stretch (not knowing that I’d nearly be swept away by front pages: “Blue sky filling with clouds, birds, wind; rain-raging drainages before reaching town.) But the all movement, all joy”). Re-read the summer in Denali. whole backpacking exploit had begun with me facing the (“Mountains, forest, layers of grey. Cool, drizzly, happy.”) willow-fringed Dietrich River, staring at huge wolfprints, During a lonely stretch in Colorado. (“[Black] Canyon, and immediately, deeply regretting what I’d gotten myself swallow me whole.”) The Adirondacks, Upstate New York. into. (“Loon, loon, my life in the call of a loon.”) With each
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reading, more underlines, scribbles, and folded corners; **** deeper desire to visit the Arctic. “The beauty here is a beauty you feel in your flesh,” Lopez describes an effect Farther back, several socioeconomic factors and political that can’t be simulated in words much less photos, “You decisions have shaped today’s Arctic: the Alaska National feel it physically, and that is why it is sometimes terrifying Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, which created to approach. Other beauty takes only the heart, or the the 8.5-million-acre GAAR and declared most of it mind” (1986, 361). Wilderness; construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and Dalton Highway beginning in 1974, both I’d read Arctic Dreams to try to understand Imagination to access oil at Prudhoe Bay, discovered in 1967; the and Desire in the similarly-maligned, seemingly-barren Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, meant to plains. Yes, there’s something special about “distant acknowledge and allot ancestral lands; Alaskan statehood landscapes”, which, more so than mountains or forests, in 1959; return of Nunamiut peoples to their homeland cities or suburbs, “provoke thoughts about one’s own in the 1930s; creation of Naval Petroleum Reserve interior landscape... The land urges us to come around to Number 4 in 1923, now the 24-million-acre National an understanding of ourselves.” Maybe my pilgrimage to Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA); collapse of the caribou the Arctic—the long, unintended and unexpected journey population in the late 19th-early 20th century (due, in to find my soul—began on the morning sixteen years part, to overhunting by whaling crews, forcing Nunamiut earlier when I stepped to the edge of the Painted Desert peoples to leave the Brooks Range and join coastal Iñupiat and first experienced wild space. peoples; purchase of Alaska (“[Secretary of State] Seward’s
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Icebox”) in 1867. Whaling ships. Fur trade. Expedition shadows swallowing mountainsides laced with snow. The after expedition, filled with “courageous, bewildered, and river carried us to the center of its valley’s great “U” and dreaming people” who sought fame, glory, wealth, and/or gave us a gravel bar with a perfectly-framed view back “fulfillment of some personal and private dream[s]” in the toward Anaktuvuk Pass and onward to the North Slope. cold, unforgiving Far North. The next morning, mountains receded into purple-blue For generations beforehand: inhabitation by Alaska Native distance while green-carpeted foothills rolled on. Ground and Canadian First Nation peoples. To tolerate the harsh, squirrels chattered from the banks. Tundra swans soared extreme conditions, they’ve come to “accept fully what overhead. My friend and I basked in sunshine, talking of is violent and tragic in nature” and, not unrelatedly, physics, phenomenology—was this real? (YES, I believe in celebrate Nuannaarpoq—a quality “of taking extravagant the world and that it is beautiful, I wrote in my notebook pleasure in being alive” (Lopez 1986, 180 and 181). that night, under a sky still ringing with sunlight, BE HERE NOW.) Layers of earlier cultural and natural history: Thule, Dorset, Pre-Dorset artifacts. Taiga, tundra. Glaciers The river picked up momentum on day three. We’d melting back into the Brooks Range, leaving moraines, been warned and worried about a stretch of rapids on kames, and kettle ponds; allowing for deranged drainages, the Anaktuvuk (well, I worried; my friend was looking pingos, and other periglacial features. Farther back, forward to it), so weren’t entirely surprised to find glaciers advancing and retreating throughout the ourselves crashing and spinning through glacial debris. Pleistocene, affecting all but an ice-free refuge between Although the wetter-than-usual weather had increased the Brooks and Alaska Ranges: muskoxen, mammoths, discharge, inundating boulders that could have proved short-faced bears. problematic with lower flows, we (and by “we”, I mean my friend, who steered the whole time) still had to pay No, no. It’s all much older. Some 160 to 105 million attention. Rocks were still exposed; the river unknown. years ago, during the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous To my untrained eye, it seemed nearly impossible to tell Periods, a proto-Pacific tectonic plate carried an island where to go or what to do, but my friend could read the arc north, crumpling it into North American continental current in riffles and gauge characteristics from glints. crust—the Brookian Orogeny. As the convergent forces He swirled through eddies and foresaw sweepers, trusted uplifted and deformed rock layers, erosional forces carried the raft to bounce or scrape over just about anything. sediment into the North Slope basin. Despite subsequent Meanwhile, I was caught cloud-watching more than once. orogenic events and geomorphological reshaping, the “Paddle!” my friend would bark, and we’d pull to avoid a land has held its basic shape since the age of the dinosaurs. boulder or aim for a better flow. (Also, mosquitoes. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that mosquitoes emerged in the Mesozoic.) Churning sky on day four: layers of grey coalesced and curtains of rain swept across the flattening landscape. That’s how it really began—mountains rising, sediment With no topographic features to guide it, the Anaktuvuk flowing, slow coevolution of lifeforms. That’s the start of meandered haphazardly, dividing and recombining the journey that led me to my soul. a hundred times into a thousand passages. My friend **** constantly had to gauge the best option—could we curl around the inside of a cliff or skootch over a gravel bar?; Eleven days from the Arctic Divide to the Arctic Ocean, should we aim for that riffle or wait for the next?—but I powered not by foot or fuel, but water and the long, low wanted to talk about avian dinosaurs, wilderness, work; pull of gravity. the meaning and marvel of this huge northern land. Mid-afternoon, tired of navigating both my relentless Right from the start, the Anaktuvuk was surprisingly conversation and that roiling grey river-lake, he asked for fast and clear, burbling us along at a good clip. The peace and quiet. Silence, the rest of the day. Gulls. first afternoon, there wasn’t much steering to do, just watching: stormclouds clearing, sun softening, blue
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Scribbled the next night: What do I want from this trip, That afternoon, we were reminded why people don’t this place? Why can’t I just enjoy this moment, these low readily venture forth across the North Slope: a furious bluffs and changing clouds? It hadn’t been a fun day. Mid- wind whipped wavelets into whitecaps, threatening to afternoon, my friend dashed off to climb a ridge while capsize us into cold, churning water. We paddled and I stayed with the raft, collecting rocks and feeling more pulled, exhausted and exhilarated. The river had finally alone than I had on my hike. Later, we passed a gosling come alive—we were earning our passage, not just riding separated from the rest of its brood, cheeping pitifully. I along. Peregrines screamed at us from the cliffs. couldn’t stop thinking about it, the fragility of life here. Rain moved in early evening, casting the landscape in an More wind on day eight, but the rain began to pass. Late eerie glow. Disconcerting, to not know how to read the afternoon, the biggest, brightest rainbow I’ve ever seen skies. arced horizon to horizon, glowing in double glory. Light—the landscape was suffused with color and light. Day five was miserable. Cold, wet, and windy. We discussed And mosquitoes—the tundra was buzzing, whining, waiting out the weather, but were only halfway to Nuiqsut droning, alive. Sandhill cranes. Fresh grizzly tracks fifty and worried that there might not be a current in the yards from where we’d chosen to camp. As Rick Bass Colville. Off we went. No talking, just staring at the grey writes of Montana’s Yaak Valley: “Tourists, beware, go river, grey sky. Gravel bars. Willows, lupine, Labrador tea. back. There is nothing to see here, only mud and insects Mid-afternoon, the wind shifted and the temperature and large biting mammals…rain and snow and sleet and dropped even more. Mindless paddling. Shivering. wind. This is a place of the spirit, no place for the flesh, Numb fingers and toes. Onset of a stupor I should have and a place of the imagination, but no place for a real life. recognized as near-hypothermic. When we finally stopped Believe in this place, and pray for it, but turn back, do not to check out a potential campsite, I tried to step out of the come here…” raft, but my frozen feet couldn’t connect with my slushy brain. I fell in the mud. Miserable. The bluffs flattened out the next day, leaving a few mini- volcano-like pingoes as the only topographic relief. We Brilliant strips of blue the next morning. Less than an climbed one early-afternoon, fighting insects and brush hour after we’d put in, the Anaktuvuk spread and swirled up to its summit, earning a view across a vast, Serengeti- as if unsure where to go, then spit us out into a huge, like scene: lush, green tundra teeming with pools and turbid channel. The Colville! Its wide waters cut into a pimpled with pingos. Brown river. Blue sky. Blazing tall, sandstone-, siltstone-, and coal-striped bluff, which sunshine. Squinting into the distance, my eye snagged on also featured sizeable wedges of dirty white ice. Meltwater an odd vertical to the northwest. My friend used his zoom trickled and gushed through gullies. Not infrequently, lens to verify—a tower at Nuiqsut. Buildings. Electric chunks of ice and rock crashed down into the river in poles. Oh. great celebrations of noise and gravity. Camped on a gravel island that night, with the rumbling cliffs on one From that point on, we were unavoidably and rather side and a prairie-sized horizon on the other, I finally felt jarringly back in a human-inhabited world. Airplane. happiness pull at my heart. This was the arctic I sought—a Motorboat. Another boat, another. Oil pipelines, place where, as Lopez promises, the land is not simply unnaturally straight even against the flat horizon. Hoping beautiful, but powerful, bound together with darkness and that it was too shallow for motorboats, we camped on a light (1986, 351). sandy side channel that the GPS told us should connect over to the Nigliq. Calm water—gleaming like mercury. The next morning, we climbed the bluff for a view of Gazillions of mosquitoes. rolling tundra to the west and a tangle of sinuous streams and ox-bow lakes to the east. Although we were standing On day ten, we floated slowly past Nuiqsut, then by a in the NPRA, there wasn’t anything to indicate it. In fact, bright orange oil rig, and, of all things, under a giant there wasn’t a sign of humanity anywhere: no structures, bridge. (ConocoPhillips completed construction on no litter, not even the drone of a distant engine. the $100-million, 1420-foot span in 2015, providing “a throughway for access to [oil development sites]” and “an
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opportunity for future development in the [NPRA].”2 Our The mudflat. The ocean. Land blended into water into little red raft must have been an unusual sight—truck sky, nothing left. The rivers and the journey down drivers stopped to stare and honk hello. Motorboats were them, past. Mountains gone, forgotten. Anaktuvuk Pass, common, though, full of Nuiqsut residents going to fish Fairbanks, anywhere else no longer mattered, no longer camps and/or just enjoying the relatively balmy weather. existed. No hopes, no dreams, no things. Across from another rig under construction, a couple of locals pulled up to chat: we’d come from Anaktuvuk Pass? Pause between tides, between breaths.
Aiming not to camp too close to the coast (in case of A vast blueness. polar bears), we fortunately found the perfect spot a few **** miles inland: a small island, a couple of hundred yards wide and twice as long, rising no more than ten feet According to some etymologists, the word “soul” traces out of the water, carpeted with tundra. Thousands of back to Proto-Germanic saiwa: “sea.”3 The original mountain avens bobbed in the breeze, heliotropic faces meaning may have been “coming from or belonging to beaming in the early-evening sunshine. After pitching the sea”, as it was believed that a person’s soul paused in our tents and enjoying a breezy, relatively mosquito-free the sea before birth or after death dinner, my friend and I embarked on a circumnavigation. **** Treasures!—caribou skull, squirrel burrows, metal drums; the skeleton of a pine tree, carried in from god knows Of course, I was neither born nor died on the edge of the where. Three quarters of the way around, we paused at the sea—on a mudflat at the end of the Nigliq Channel, with island’s southern tip, scoured by ice heaves. Everything its rivulets and pools, its white line of ice far offshore. we care about, my friend said, gesturing south. An oil From there, my friend and I still had to paddle back refinery, Nuiqsut, nearly all of North America. to Nuiqsut—past the island, past the oil rigs and that preposterous bridge. From Nuiqsut, to Barrow, Fairbanks, Everything? I thought. the bustling, blaring, human-made and -messed-up world. That’s when I first sensed it. Standing there, on that little But that’s where life paused for a moment, and I found my scrap of land, looking not toward the continent but at the soul. sky, feathered with the pastels of an Arctic midsummer non-sunset, I began to realize that everything I cared Ludicrous, I know. I stood on the shore for less time than about—family, friends; my house, my job; the Painted it took for the tide to turn. Had it been windier, greyer— Desert and other beloved places—was not everything. had it been the middle of winter, dark and dangerous— There was an edge of something, I could feel, something what would I have seen? Had I just been plunked down there, farther north. Something magical, something true, there—ridden one of ConocoPhillips’ helicopters to some missing piece of who I am and who I want to be. that spot, without the month-long backpacking/rafting preface—would I have felt the same? Had I not gone—had The next morning, I woke early and re-looped our little my original plans worked out—would I have ever realized island, pausing again at the southern tip and even longer what I was missing, or that I was missing anything at all? at the north. (The ocean!) Soon after we packed and put in, the wind calmed, remnants of clouds cleared, and the Writing of his desire to be with icebergs in the North, channel spread into a half-dozen different outlets. East, Lopez muses “I do not know if I had had this wish for we aimed, clinging to a shallow bank—what we had of years…But when I saw them, it was as though I had been solid ground. Mirages shimmered in the sun-drenched waiting quietly for a very long time” (1986, 184). Similarly, distance. But for the ripples radiating out from our I do not know if I had had a wish to be with a mudflat on paddles, all would have been utter calm. the end of the Nigliq Channel, overlooking the blue-
2 N.a. n.d. “No. 2 - Colville River Nigliq Channel Bridge.” Roads & 3 Barnhart, Robert. 1988. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. H W Bridges. https://www.roadsbridges.com/no-2-colville-river-nigliq-chan- Wilson: Hackensack, NJ. nel-bridge
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white Arctic Ocean for years, but when I felt it nearing, Now that I know that souls exist—that the world is I knew that I’d been waiting for it my whole life. And I perhaps full of them, in the most unexpected places—I hadn’t expected to find my soul, but there it was: a feeling can’t help but ask: Where is your lightness, your wholeness, of lightness, of wholeness, of Nuannaarpoq—“extravagant your joy? Your soul is out there, too—go find it pleasure in being alive.” Something that glows within me, and yet exists entirely separately from me: a bit of land, more water, ice, mostly air.
Tyra Olstad is a writer, geographer, and former park ranger, paleontology technician, cave guide, and summit steward. In addition to one book—Zen of the Plains—she has published research articles, creative non-fiction essays, photoessays, and hand-drawn maps in a variety of scholarly and creative journals, including GeoHumanities, The Hopper, The Trumpeter, Written River, and Newfound. She currently teaches Geography and Environmental Sustainability at SUNY Oneonta.
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CLIMBING THE SACRED BEAR
BY BURT BRADLEY I’ve come to know mountains better after first living in the Sierra Nevadas and now for the past twenty years in the Big Horn Basin in Northwest Wyoming surrounded It is called Noavosse, “The Good Mountain,” by the by their rough namesakes the Absarokas, Big Horns, and Cheyenne, Mato Paha, “Bear Mountain” by the Sioux, Beartooth Mountains. Yet, I’m still a novice when it comes and Bear Butte by the United States Department of the to the sacred. Interior. A sign at the base of the mountain reads, Mato Paha, Bear Butte is a place of prayer and centering “Here through the centuries the Plains Indians received that is not just solitude but a meditative, vital space. spiritual guidance from the creator. It is not a place to merely relax or camp out. It is an Here the Cheyenne prophet, Sweet Medicine, received the environment in which to experience that rarest of human four sacred arrows, the four commandments and a moral feelings: rapture. It is a sensual place, too, in the visionary code. sense of fully listening, seeing, and engaging with one’s entire being. “Things” are to be experienced differently Here the Sioux worshiped Wankan Tanka and paid tribute than what one experiences of life from one’s front window to the Spiritual Ruler.” or favorite fishing hole.
And here, I find myself before dawn on the day after And what is it exactly that one perceives? Or, to phrase summer solstice, a man who has spent the first half of the question more accurately, not what, but how does one his life living at thirty-two feet above sea level with little experience a difference, an intensification of one’s senses, knowledge of mountains and less knowledge of the sacred, of one’s thoughts about the nature of things, about one’s ready to ascend. life in the deepest sense?
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Standing at the base of Bear Butte, I think about Black Elk, I begin to walk up the mountain, keeping the same pace as the Oglala Sioux holy man, who over a century earlier on a the retreating shadow, eventually letting it overtake me, the mountain top fifty miles to the south had his great vision gray air becoming light, revealing the rocky incline, talus of the world: cracking under my feet. I am met with the sweet scent of purple and yellow flowers and especially the white capped “And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell, and I aroma (slightly sour at first then sweet) of wild yarrow. understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred Brightly colored prayer cloths flap from buffalo berry manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape bushes and ponderosa pine. Soon it is mountain sparrows of all shapes as they must live together like one being.” and robins and luminous yellow gold finches come to greet me. And here, a butterfly planted on a bush, wings Visions are an inquiry into the larger questions, beliefs, opening and closing in a slow, halting, silent applause. and ideas in life regarding one’s way of being in the world, one’s direction, one’s knowledge, one’s relationship to It is a walk that also becomes a heaviness in my thighs, a others and to the whole overall. Not that the little, shortness in my breathing, until I must pause, a respite, my everyday life is ignored but it is to be seen through a wider hand timidly on the burnt bark of a dead pine (remnant lens, in a sacred manner. from the devastating fire of 1996).
You can photograph the mountain from the parking lot, or Half way up the southern slope, with still another 700 you can camp out at Bear Butte Lake two miles away. But feet of hiking around to the east and up to the peak, I look to experience the sacredness of the place you need to climb. back down. There spreads the Great Plains in a series of I decide to walk up just before sunrise. It is a pristine sloping undulations of new summer green, some places summer morning and my mood has already been enhanced clotted with stands of cottonwood trees, the rest grass— by the lingering atmosphere of religious ceremonies presently green. But come the first full week of rainless, conducted the previous four days as part of a summer wind- scoured sunlight, it will redden for a day or two then solstice celebration. gradually fade to a brownless brown, its natural, “Great Plains” coloring. For now: green space, seemingly endless, I was allowed to stay in the empty camp at the base of the that is somewhat shocking from this first view a thousand mountain. I pitched my tent among abandoned sweat feet up and away from the flat stretch of highway. lodges and communal fire pits with various “altars” of stones, feathers, and prayer cloths—not to mention the A flicker of color nearby—a bird or flower or prayer cloth campsite of an old Lakota man, who sang until midnight alive in the wind, a spirit reminding me of where I am, of accompanied by a drum. what this mountain has been all about, and personally, what the task is before me. I spent the night by a fire, listening to him talking to some friends, low, good friend talk, barely audible, no Onward and upward, I march, not Boy Scout style or as louder than the occasional bird whistle, the loon clarinet a strolling tourist with the proverbial camera banging my in the distance, the murmuring creek, the slight breeze chest. The sign at the trail head suggested, “Whisper when whispering through the trees. talking to others.” I take this to mean a deeper task for one alone. For me, this means trying to hush my “monkey So, the hike itself is charged before I take my first step. I mind” as the Buddhists call it, the incessant chatter in my am a mixture of eagerness and slight apprehension. Should head of all that life I left back down the hill. Like a crazed I? Am I worthy? Can I do this right? I carry with me a short-wave radio operator late at night who can’t just listen gift of prayer tobacco from my friend Jenny who said it is to one signal for more than thirty seconds, my mind still for homage, adding with a smile, “And a little insurance.” “broadcasts” snippets of conversations, some overheard, For or against what, I wasn’t sure. The sun slowly appears, some still engaged in. They range from the previous night first as a mere lighting of the far sky, and then on the to the day before that, some a month old, some ten years furthest plains, the last long shadow of night shrinking its earlier— an old argument, a miscommunication (“What I way toward me at the foot of the mountain. meant to say...”), a lingering critical judgment (“If I were
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her, I’d...”) —until it all runs together to become, finally, above the horizon. I feel its first heat and strip off my nothing but static. lined, flannel shirt. Immediately, I grow thinner, lighter, more flexible, but also more vulnerable as I ascend. I try Immediately, almost angrily, I remind myself to pay to fight off the nagging thought of unworthiness, of being attention. spiritually “incorrect.” I stop, turn, and see that the plains are now brilliantly lit, and incredibly, have grown larger, Pay attention. Pay as in giving something. A tithe, a greener. donation, an offering of respect, of consciousness, of mindfulness. Attention as in listening. To the chirps, the I stand next to a stone outcropping with yellowish lichen buzzes, the crunching under my shoes, and the pockets of marbling its north face. I pull out the Kinnick Kinnick, silence in between, reminding me where I am, not who. traditional ceremonial tobacco of bearberry, red willow, And what I am doing at this very moment, not before or osha root, mullen, and yerba santa—friend Jenny’s gift. I later. Pay attention to the rock I’ve just stumbled over. To hold a pinch of it out before me and realize I’m at a loss for the next step. And the next. To the sharp light splashed on words. I feel intimidated by the responsibility of the act. the bearberry bushes. To the sudden sweet scent of some I wish to do this right. Me, some middle-aged, would-be mountain flower or the odd oil-burnt smell of creosote on apprentice without a master. the logs lining the path. Shhhhhhh. Walk, breathe, sense. I begin by thanking the mountain directly for allowing I resume, quieter somewhat, slower. In no hurry. The me to be here. I offer a blessing which I hope doesn’t pace of my ascent now coinciding with the rising sun. I sound too much to me like my father’s terse grace at look at the fiery orb, a hand rubbed, polished apple— Thanksgiving, Easter, and Christmas (terse because the Golden Delicious—hanging from a branch of sky just act reminded him of his Southern Baptist heritage which
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he had abandoned long ago). I toss the tobacco out like Instead, they hold still in mid-air, much like a dragonfly, a farmer scattering feed, and surprisingly feel more valid, buzzing as they do, seeming to watch me. After awhile, a though still unsteady. I move on. couple “bump” me here and there, on an elbow, a forearm, the top of my head—Am I spirit or flesh? Am I being Finally nearing the peak, I stop again, mainly to resist my respectful? These are the guardians I think—maybe European heritage of “having to get to the top.” Why? even the spirits of the ancestors themselves. I try to stay What is the point? “Because it is there,” declared the first centered as long as possible...longer. This means losing white man (with Sherpa guides) to scale Mt. Everest, Sir my “I.” Instead, be here and nothing else, but present in Edmund Hillary. From what little I know about him, the sharp rocks, the ponderosa pine riffling with color, the he was a man who seemed to have had a reverence for prayer cloths alive in the stiff breeze that remind me I will mountains. not fool anyone here, especially myself.
I try to think of his statement from a Zen Buddhist’s This isn’t a game. This isn’t “cool,” or a “Wait until I tell perspective. “Because it is there” does not connote somebody” opportunity. This is, for me, my practice, my climbing simply for fun or fame or ego gratification. If best effort at faith, which Katagiri Roshi says is neither declared with a spiritual meaning, then the statement something given by somebody, nor is it something coming cannot be equated with an insidious notion of, “I from you. Rather, “Faith means tranquility, and complete conquered the mountain,” or “I claim this mountain...” tranquility is the source of our nature and our existence.” Rather, “Because it is there” is a wonderful Zen statement, filled with meaningfulness, yet completely understated, to I gradually move out of silent, sitting meditation to the point of irony, even absurdity. “The sword that kills consciously ask for blessings—for my daughters, my the man is the sword that saves the man.” son, my wife, all my loved ones, friends, family, past and present and future—as heartfelt and mindfully as “Because it is there” beckons to me. It is a spiritual possible. My heart is moved to ask for a blessing for “all challenge for me to experience this mountain more fully sentient beings,” as the Buddhist vow puts it. I take vows than I have. To put it another way, “Because it is there,” and offer prayers for the earth itself. I ask for nothing I must. Or, “Because it is there,” and I am not. It is a in return, except for assistance to honor life in all of its challenge for me to grasp what it means to “get to the top.” manifestations, to continually cherish life with clarity, conviction, and courage. With such thoughts, I climb the last fifty feet to the peak. My first decision is to avoid the large wooden, designated I manage to meditate about twenty minutes I guess, lookout platform. Not without some trepidation, I follow maybe thirty. I’m not that strong spiritually yet. It takes a barely discernible footpath that traverses the ridge to the great strength to worship—to surrender to that which south. There’s one of those Park Service trail signs with a one barely comprehends, to give up one’s intellect, one’s figure with a walking stick and back pack hiking inside a reason, to “think,” instead, with the heart, to open oneself red circle with a red line through it. One thing I am clear up to intuition, to intimation, to a felt sense of the world, about: I am not hiking. I step out on the path already lined to the energy of the world, to the spirit of the world. This with prayer cloths and offerings with as pure an intention is the kind of spiritual strength one finds in the figures of as possible: I’m here to offer a blessing, to give thanks, to Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Crazy Horse, Black Elk sprinkle some ceremonial tobacco, and to practice zazen, and, our own times, in a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King sitting meditation, (my only “formal” praying). Jr., a Mother Theresa. Giant shoes to fill, I know, but footsteps, nonetheless, to follow. And sitting among the prayer cloths, the small stone “altars” and cairns with various offerings adorning them, Still, though I have meditated only thirty minutes, the act I am most mindful of the space I inhabit, the heady wind, feels thorough, focused. As my ego dissolves, I experience the girth of mountain beneath me, the brassy light, and this mountain as a site of the earth’s power, a spiritual an odd species of flies. They are as large as small bees, capitol of the world. but they don’t zoom all about like the common house fly.
Volume 08 No. 01 March 2019 SECTION THREE
Later, on the South Dakota State Park observation say the Great Spirit saved the mountain from being platform, I find I am unable to write poetry. I can’t “stop” completely burnt. But it was a terrific fire, devastating. experiencing the dynamics of the place—though writing, Approximately, ninety percent of the trees on Bear Butte poetry, is often a way of connecting for me, of becoming were either consumed by the fire or scorched to a point an integral part of the process of being in a place, or of where recovery is unlikely. The Lakotas I spoke with the consciously participating in an event, never with the night before insinuated it was “non-native people” who “objectivity” of a reporter or scientist, but subjectively, started it—accidentally. sympathetically, intimately as a poet. At the moment, however, this is just not to be. But it seemed, to me, something was a bit askew with their tale and with all “accidents.” The emphasis shouldn’t be But I do have another way of praying. Laying down my on who is to blame; it doesn’t have anything to do with pencil and notebook, I began to dance Tai chi. I practice blame. Even the Lakota seemed uncomfortable with their a version called “Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain” own explanation. I heard an uncertainty in their voices as that incorporates the five elements (fire, water, wood, they told me about the “campfire that wasn’t extinguished metal, earth) into the dance. Dancing Tai chi brings me properly.” They spoke with more conviction when they physically into accord with the movements of wind, trees, mentioned “a big wind,” and that there had been a drought. prayer cloths, flies, sun, and space—the feeling of being on top of a mountain, of moving in a slow circle following the Finally, everyone agrees in hindsight—Cheyenne, Lakota, sun, east to west. Afterwards, I am inspired to write. and Ranger Rambow. It has been a purification wrought by the Creator. Everything is better today, despite the loss Atop this great wave of earth, I dance, of ponderosa pine and the frequent mud slides; there is much new grass, even an abundance of the precious “June” the ground below humming roots. grass used in Sundance ceremonies. These feet rise and fall slowly The day before, I met a blithe, young woman, who worked to a song of breathing, falling in the information booth at the Bear Butte trail head. She was chatty, spilling over with youth’s sense of its own and rising within this wooded space: vitality. She informed me the journey up the mountain this body becoming tree, pine fleshed, was an “easy hike” of about an hour and a half, and a half hour down. “You could be done in no time.” arms branching into the blue air, Recalling her statement, I laugh quietly and am tempted to where these hands grow wings say to the sky, “Out of the mouth of babes.” But, I don’t. and circle in the fledgling light. As I begin my descent, however, I assume a “no-time” attitude and begin walking mindfully one step at a time. A half hour later, the sun, a young ponderosa pine higher, In step with my breathing. I center my concentration in I see far down the mountain. Ranger vehicles already in the my hara, my lower abdomen below my navel. Centered parking lots, and a mile away the first visitor at the gate, and centerless, this is kinhin, slow walking meditation one and a half mile further back turning off the main highway practices between periods of formal sitting meditation in another visitor’s car. I estimate they will be up here within the zendo. an hour. My time, alone, with the spirit of the place is ending. And yet I linger not ten feet from the steps of the I walk, neither stuck in my own thoughts, nor attached platform on the way back down. There’s one more task I to the phenomenal world about me. If anything, need to perform. my focus is somewhere between both. For when I am feeling particularly right, out there and inside are What is it? I sit, listening to the wind sighing through the indistinguishable. During such clear moments, a pebble blackened bones of the pines. Later, Bear Butte State Park glinting in the sunlit path at my feet, glistens inside me. Ranger Chuck Rambow tells me the Native Americans Again, to use Zen phrasing, I walk mindfully.
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Not I am walking down the mountain, but I am the I halt, again perhaps halfway, my hand against calcite rock. mountain’s walking consciousness. I am its slope, its talus, There a fly an inch from my index finger. I move ever so its altitude, its gravity in my calves and thighs, its eyes— slightly toward it and it moves minutely toward me. It seeing a mountain sparrow nearly invisible, mottled brown walks onto my fingernail. I make no motion to brush it as the tree limb on which it perches. I am the mountain off. In fact, I carefully move my hand back to its kinhin rose, the wild yarrow that rings the top in clusters of white position over the other folded across my lower belly and cupped flowers. I am the mountain’s ears, its listening to continue walking meditation. the wind, to the birds, to a jet 35,000 feet overhead, and to a single car winding its way toward the visitor’s center Nothing misses my attention and, yet my attention holds a mile and half below. I am also the mountain’s fingers onto nothing. Each flat stone step every twenty-five feet and feet. As well as the mountain’s mood of serenity or so, strategically placed where the path switchbacks, and expansiveness, its warming beneath the rising sun, traversing its way back and forth down the hill. Each twig, its lingering coolness in the shade on its unlit north side. each scattered leaf, the peppering of shade and light across The Zen Master, Dogen uses the term “whole faith-like the rock-strewn path. body,” which means your whole body and mind are exactly For the Lakota, this mountain (particularly the southern faith. It is with this kind of “whole faith-like body,” that I slope) represents the bear of the Devil’s Tower myth, who descend the mountain. after futilely attempting to reach the young princesses (or I notice a butterfly moving alongside of me, moving as I warriors depending on who tells the tale), gave up and move. It has black wings with splotches of white. It stays wandered the fifty miles to this part of South Dakota, with me for twenty, thirty yards. I can’t help but think of where it lay down to become Bear Butte. But I’m still it as escorting me on my way, a guide, a guardian, a fellow on the eastern slope, which is the “Cheyenne side” of sentient being. And then just as it stops, landing on a the mountain that they see as a great sacred lodge where white flower on the up slope, another butterfly appears, their folk hero, Sweet Medicine, received the Four Sacred tangerine colored with black spots, and immediately begins Arrows, the medicine laws of the tribe. to escort me for the next twenty or thirty yards. It is one In the past, these myths seemed historically and culturally of the most simple, silent, and subtle of events, and yet so far away from me. Yet, here I expect at any moment beaming with awe and gratitude for the attention during my descent to meet one of the Old Ones, maybe
Volume 08 No. 01 March 2019 SECTION THREE
Sweet Medicine himself. I wonder what sort of sacred The last fellow erupts, huffing to me, “Bet it’s easier going bundle I might receive? Is there something I can take back down!” to America at the beginning of the Twenty First Century? I steel myself, trying to not pass judgment (though I I descend, my body and mind attuned to the details of the already have). They will receive what they bring in place. I glance down at the fly still sitting on my hand, their hearts. The mountain is ancient, imperturbable, silent, motionless. It waits too. My spirit guide? This mysterious. Spiritual responses—whether rewards or insignificant, even reprehensible creature, what truth repercussions—are unfathomable. Those who believe, could it carry? I know the common attitude. But, I still who have faith, and who act accordingly, are astute and resist swatting at it and choose instead to walk with it as will be the first to recognize the movement of spirit. Life my guide. In and out of the dappled light and shadow, begins with suffering, says the Buddha, and yet he is often I inhale the subtle and rich scent of pine and flowers I depicted smiling. He’s not amused by distress, but at peace cannot name. because he understood the cause (ignorance) and the cure (knowledge) and the result (enlightenment). And the colors! Here and there in certain patches of bright light, a burst of magenta and fuchsia and deep purple, Here, back in my living room, I’m smiling, too. Not splashes of creamy yellow and sky blue. I can’t imagine because I know what the Buddha knows, but because six what the fly sees with its magnified sense of seeing, but months have passed since that predawn hike and I have to me, the colors are so vivid as to be fully meaningful as not left Bear Butte. Or, rather, Bear Butte has not left simply color for its own sake. me. I don’t mean, however, just in the sense of memory, of mentally recalling that time on the sacred mountain. As if on cue upon reaching a certain boundary, the fly Rather, practicing sitting meditation looking out the tickles my hand as it moves for the first time, perhaps not window, I am again experiencing a feeling of centeredness. more than a millimeter, before flying off. Thirty seconds The Buddhists declare, “Everything is Mind,” or as Dogen later, I encounter the first humans of the day, a young puts it, “The entire universe is the human body.” My couple, walking fast, but quietly. We pass without eye feeling of centeredness when climbing Bear Butte and contact, wordlessly. The mountain gives us permission to my feeling of centeredness looking out my window are do this without guilt or feelings of uneasiness. the same feeling, the same insight, the same center of this entire universe. As Black Elk explained his vision atop Then not long, three men, middle-aged, loud talking, Mt. Harney: “I saw myself on the central mountain of kicking rocks, stumbling, laughing. “How’s it going?” the the world, the highest place...But, the central mountain is first booms. Cameras around their necks, sweating already, everywhere.” Everywhere being Mt. Harney, Bear Butte, no doubt in a hurry to get to the top, take their pictures, and Heart Mountain four miles from this living room remark about the view, then scramble down to where next? floor here where I am sitting gazing out the window as Devil’s Tower to the west? Mt. Rushmore to the south? A winter begins to solidify around my house in a sacred casino in Deadwood? manner.
Burt Bradley lives on a bluff in Northwest Wyoming seventy miles from Yellowstone National Park. For over thirty years, with his wife Janet, a photographer, he has delved into the wild serenity of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. His writing has appeared in Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region, Michigan Quarterly Review, Best of Writers at Work, among others. He is currently professor emeritus at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, where he taught Writing in the Wild classes in Yellowstone and the Southwest Desert. This first poetry collection, After Following, won the 2018 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and is now available.
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SECTION FOUR
THE MINDFUL KITCHEN
Seasonal • Mindful • Delicious
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“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
SPRING IN THE MINDFUL KITCHEN WITH HEIDI BARR
In the northland, sometimes spring isn’t sure how it but then slipped in the mud and froze to the ground. wants to show up - like the year it tried to make an early That’s what happens when we try to do too much too arrival one March, and we were out in the fields running soon. Because here’s the deal. January isn’t the time to around, relishing in the warmer weather while the snow make changes. (Cue the hallelujah chorus) I mean, think melted with abandon. The seasonal ravine stream flowed about it - everything is frozen solid, the days are dark, freely, the moss turned vibrant green, and the robins and our instincts say hunker down and survive. On the returned. A new beaver family started swimming around other hand, spring is the time to make changes - subtle, on our side of the lake, and the swans and bald eagles gradual ones, even when the season seems to get a false visited with more frequency as the lake opened up. start, because the sun is regaining strength, the days are lengthening, and it’s time to plant seeds. But seeing But then, a few weeks later, it was back to freezing those changes stick, well, that takes patience. at night and only got up into the 40s during the day. The lake ice stopped melting, and the sun took a little So, as this spring takes hold (whatever that looks like breather before coming out again in full. The tiny blue in your part of the world) identify what your life wants flowers that always pop up first in at the edge of the more of, and add just a little bit. Then when you feel woods decided to bide their time instead opening too good about what you’ve added, add just a little bit more. soon. And so on. Small things have power when they are coupled with intention and persistence. It can be like that for us, too, right? We get super excited about all of those New Year’s resolutions as the calendar Here’s a recipe to help you practice mindfully welcoming turns over, but then a month in, it’s back to the same whatever you need more of in your life this spring, one old habits, and we’re wondering what happened to all of little bit of it at a time. that energy. It’s like we ran around in the sun for a time,
Author of Woodland Manitou and Prairie Grown, Heidi Barr lives in Minnesota with her husband and daughter where they tend a large organic vegetable garden, explore nature and do their best to live simply. As a mother, spouse, gardener, and wellness coach, she is committed to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities and the planet. Heidi holds a Master’s degree in Faith and Health Ministries, and occasionally coordinates with yoga teachers and organic farms to offer nature- based retreat experiences. Visit her at heidibarr.com.
Volume 08 No. 01 March 2019
Risotto with Foraged Spring Greens Serves 4 as a main dish Time to prepare: 45 minutes
Ingredients
1.5 cups arborio rice
2 TB olive oil
1 cup chopped onion (or wild ramps if you’ve got ‘em)
3-4 cups vegetable broth (warm)
½ cup dry white wine (optional)
1 TB butter
½ cup parmesan cheese
1-2 cups (packed) dandelion greens or nettles
Salt and pepper to taste
Wash dandelion greens or blanch nettles, leaves only, in a pot of boiling water til just wilted and set aside.
Heat the broth on the stovetop on low - keep warm for the duration of cooking.
Saute the onion in the olive oil until softened, 3-5 minutes.
Add rice to the pan and stir to coat with oil. Keep stirring for 30-60 seconds.
Add wine if using, stirring until absorbed. Add broth ½ cup at a time, continuously stirring, adding more broth when the last addition has been absorbed by the rice. This step will take 20-35 minutes, and it’s a great opportunity to practice patience and pay attention to your breath and posture. When rice is tender, add 1 tablespoon of butter and the cheese. Stir to combine until cheese and butter have melted. Add the greens and serve with extra parmesan.
Enjoy the rest of the wine with your meal if you desire. SECTION FIVE
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
POETRY
“And your very flesh shall be a great poem.” —Walt Whitman
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L.M. BROWNING
THE LAWS OF GRAVITY THE LOST HORIZON
Expectations are sheer cliffs we cannot help Souls age in thousand-fold nights, wandering but climb. The perfect, plumb ground too easy and expected across internal landscapes to desert’s bears no liking for those beings without wings edge. At the corner of a crossroad, a but for whom heights hold draw. blue tail flicks and slicks as the lizard
slides through dust, around adobe wall, and
Hope is a thing with feathers disappears in the cracked door, cadmium but does it know how to fly? yellow deep. Landscapes converge, coyotes
howl and the rattlesnake shakes, recoiling.
Milky way rivers run above sandy
THE ROAD FROM SANTA FE scape. Daylight drown, watching stars emerge to TO CIMARRON teach the cure that lies in the slow silence. I had a vision there–in the land of
Red dust, thick heat and shifting sheer shapes. Rocks sanguine from Sangre stacked higgledy-piggledy by tired Gods bleeding into the snowy roads long-evaporated under midday that lead to the hidden mountain sun. They walked off down trails erased by winds where the lone buffalo waits. that keep secrets from time and memory.
It was there star-crossed and awe-struck my path
joined with a dark-eyed Delila seeking
my soul and the doorway into my world.
Trickster, temptress, bride, I can only hope as
I abide by the heart’s pulling, following
her through trees, unto silhouetted horizon.
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
GWENDOLYN MORGAN
“AND ALL RAIN IS HOLY WATER” SHE SAYS three raccoons came to the bird feeder this morning segregated by fear before she had her first cup of hibiscus tea immigration regulations before it started raining she cannot see the clouds a woman was taken off a TriMet bus behind the wall yesterday by ICE the grey edges of sorrow on her way to work, she was late remembers the flight feathers of the heron she is in the detention center in Tacoma the silver chain of the rosary her children in custody in Portland rosewood, rose water it is raining between them the deer eat the wild roses in the backyard the fog rises from the Columbia River a doe, two fawns, black-tailed a Great Blue Heron lifts her wings she will be black-listed rises along the mud flats is black listed, dreams of the three sisters her family in Oaxaca, Otavalo black beans, corn, delicata candy stripe squash. her family in Rose City Park her family in detention Her daughter has roses on her rain boots, her family in deportation proceedings. splashes in puddles, sings the alphabet song in English, in Spanish, waiting for the no. 2 bus She fingers the rosary in her pocket dreaming, she walks through the waters Our Lady of Guadalupe of the Rio Grande again Rosewood prayers raccoons gather at the river “I will never forget you” “and all rain is holy water” she says. she says to her children, niños
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HELOISE JONES
DECEMBER 2018 KENYA, THE MARA
Dedicated to Simon Metekai Masago and Jackson Kayionni Letiol
The bleached bones of buffalo, Saying, as the sun sears them white, wildebeest. my horns remain strong and black, Their skulls, chin forward, curved, evidence of my own mighty a line of white strung behind. passing though brought down and Nuggets of vertebrae that once held devoured. sturdy backs. Can you see us? I see their necks stretched forward, their bodies as an offering Where grass with rise rain-ripened to the lions who feast on their organs, and green, caress the ghosts of their flesh. our backs in the sway of the breeze. Rise through and around these bones, As if they say, here, this is how and wait for the next crossing, I live on. In your pride, the great safari from the Serengeti. in the packs of hyenas that follow, and those of the jackals White flags, here forever, behind them. In the final gleaning on The Mara. The last trace by the gray-backed vultures who of this pact we made to life. polish these bones into clean, stark markers like flags, reminders of the great migration that rides with the seasons and rains, by no clock but the turn of the earth.
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
JASON HINCHCLIFFE
THE FIRST TIME HE SAW THE OCEAN. THE PHONE DOESN’T RING.
He pulls the blanket down to swipe a mosquito from his neck. The phone doesn’t ring, no matter how long he watches it. Goosebumps slither across his skin and he’s not sure if the For three days he’s been waiting. He called the few numbers air is cold, or only compared to the heat trapped scrawled in his address book. Listened to the voices under the blanket by their bodies pressed together. quiet with pity, that wanted to help, The flicker of headlights teases them to watchfulness but hadn’t seen either of his children in years. until the lights pass safely above their heads, Each day the lady with the clipboard comes back, disappearing when the car turns at the crossroad. sits in the chair nearest the open window, Their little hideaway remains undisturbed. and watches him watch the phone. Wind rustles the trees, pre-autumn leaves scratching the branches. Age has taught him many things, He remembers when he was young, driving to the coast with his but not how to deal with her patient kindness. family. The pictures on the mantle show the family that even It was the first time he saw the ocean. He remembers the waves, then had forgotten how to smile. Most of the haircuts in and his memory isn’t much different from the sound the photographs went out of style twenty years ago. he’s hearing from the trees. The ocean frightened him that day, His eyes linger on the smoke-yellowed wallpaper, the wind so strong it tried to carry his slim body forward, the stained and filthy carpet under his feet, ballooning his clothes in front of him as the table strewn with old crinkled newspapers that he stared out past the end of the sky. he gave up reading when reading started to hurt his eyes. He remembers clinging to his mother’s hand, The mess had accumulated in recent years because he afraid to let go, fearing to be swept into gets tired so easily anymore. It never bothered him the angry fathomless deep. because it was his own mess, his own house. His hand flings up, the bites not even hurting anymore. It was just a dizzy spell, he wants to tell her, not even He can tell she’s still awake beside him by the unevenness of her truly believing his own untruth. breath. Sporadically, they attempt conversation but it’s just reflex, too. All the words they spoke earlier make it difficult to find the right words now.
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CHRISTOPHER NYE
PATH TO A DISTANT SHORE THE POND
I look out over Poems Out Of Music: Mozart, Sonata for Piano and Violin in C a landscape in ashes— (K296), second movement truth a casualty, beauty perverted, What draws them to this place, compassion in short supply. the quiet pond like a parenthesis But here at my feet in the landscape, an eye for the earth? a green thread. Willows drape the banks and shadow the shallows. I pick up the end The still surface is punctuated with pink and follow. and white nymphaeas like the ones Monet It parallels highways, loved and painted. Just now they begin crosses rivers, to close for the night as if to put climbs mountain passes, their heads down on their round pads. till I arrive A dragonfly, iridescent green, at another coast. arrows across the pond, and a kingfisher from a branch
The thread ends in the needle eyes the water for its next meal. of a grandmother with gentle eyes, Seeing the bird, the young man quilting. tells the story of the Fisher King. Each square shows a scene She takes his hand. They reflect on how of forgiveness and reconciliation— for centuries myths and traditions the Prodigal Son, sheltered people from having Arab and Jew to think for themselves, but now making music together, our only cover comes from cloth an anger demon that we alone can weave. departing a resentful wife. Mirrored in deep water the two see
When finished, the quilt cottonwhite clouds, a deepening cobalt sky, will show the way and they savor the moment, to heal families making a memory and raise children. that loosely braids two strands And every stitch that may grow to become one. a blessing.
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
MARK TAKSA
SILENCE IS LOUD HISS
Shoes stop shuffling. The eyes of the crowd Looking at love emerging like sunlight inspect, as if to witness doves fluttering on the faces or workers sharing lunch and plans from my lips. I remember the rebel on a park bench, I wait by my window. who looked over the clouds and complained, I get a call to fix plumbing. Hearing the hiss with a vulture’s shriek, that the sky of the spraying pipe, I see fog did not shine where he stood. blocking the sun over rifles on a boulevard Ground cracked and swallowed this complainer. where any song is of a bird busted. People who gathered to hear his complaint Though I wrench a kitchen pipe, burnt in sky’s flames… My silence my feet race. I howl for a woman to run, is loud. I am not a prophet, too brave fear that she, hustled to a hissing box— with complaint to be questioned. Silence stays. not feeling the ripping of her finger—will scrape No person stands longer than the wind. a message against walls I will not read.
I pull her to an alley where we could have hidden. Her hair, wire tangled, once curved like a scarf ridding a waterfall. Her whisper fills the hush of my home. Beyond my window, the world converses.
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ROBERT HIRSCHFIELD
THE RIVER ADVENT
You carried your bag of sins: She looks inside the mail box a wedge of moldy rye, as if maybe a new life has arrived a poppy bagel with the mote your dentures made. in an old aerogram from Plonsk.
You asked me where the river was. She sees a sparrow carrying her father’s voice
You forgot it was Rosh Hashanah, in a hat box. but you remembered the river, Her bunions blaze like Jerusalem the Jewish river of Andre Breton between the thumbs of Titus where for the new year astride the fake sun. sins masquerade as sacrificial bread, God wakes in a foul mood whining to have their old lives back. from her fisted bed of tissues.
Every day you were thrown like the bread. He just brushes past her.
I stopped trying to catch you He used to be a gentleman. when your emptiness bent my arms into the wet sizzle of air untouched by God.
Walking together, the space between us was the space between the bread and the river that neither of us could find.
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
C.M. RIVERS
PILEATED WOODPECKER, INSTRUCTIONS EARLY APRIL Live an aesthetic life
He prances. or a theoretical one. Just live.
Snow still clings Shred your records to the elbows of branches. of ancient matters.
Sapsucker’s cousin, Investigate your resilience, your softness – he throws a glance. you contain more of both
Well-trained in his craft, than anyone thinks. he is listening Protest sentiment, be less academic. for what he inherently knows. More delete key, more nectar.
He seeks the essential, Burn concepts. what is necessary Compost duality with singularity. to sustain life, Exhale clutter, inhale clarity. what he knows to be Take some lateral drifting the inflexible schedule to contemplate structure, what form of survival. you might work to serve next –
Maybe that is why he works you are still in a world the way he works: assertive, of forms, after all. and with such verve. A pilgrimage, perhaps.
Perhaps he is strutting A walkabout. his hard-won recognition Go, elucidate. that things are what they are, and nothing more.
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JESSICA MARTINI
EXACTLY HALF AND BE MADE WELL
Exactly half a moon You can’t think or say beams at me silver or pray and it is my total occupation yourself well – lying on this sandstone mesa well is my father watching clouds fresh from catholic charities migrate across the sky laughing at my boy-cut
I have been running from my enemies lately my ballcap afraid to see the spark telling me he’ll make it big of mercy in silicon valley in their hearts telling me he’ll live
to one hundred and ninety
asking me
you playing for the yankees now?
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
RICHARD SCHIFFMAN
ALMOST CLEAR CHEMOTHERAPY
Shredded like pennants Trees also lose their hair after the storm from the chemotherapy of winter, clouds scudding low but wear no wig to hide over the scalloped bridges the missing foliage. grazing skyscrapers Leaf change is a spell of nausea rushing out to sea before the long prostration, in boils bolls mounds hillocks when bare, but unashamed, a roiled geography of vapors they bear the icy blasts passing gray white golden overhead that cauterize their veins streaked with rills and rivulets and freeze the swelling cambium, of half light shot through arrest the unchecked spread with pools almost blue of summer’s green disease. where clouds have thinned to almost sky Not that trees are stoic or heroic. where soon ten billion suns Nor should you be, Jane, will almost pierce as, in these Arctic months ahead, the jaundice-yellow haze you wear the wig of human hair of city lights and almost that I promise not to stare at but not quite when you comb it as your own, the unquiet cloud when you press it down of this body of this mind against the gusts. which is also a storm that passes And do what all trees must— which is also a sky in motion sink sap to root, bend and I will almost without breaking. remember to remember that I am starlight too.
WAYFARER | 93 SECTION FIVE
KAY MERKEL BORUFF
PAINTING THE ELEPHANT GOLD
“Hell, we just wanted to see the show.” –W. C. Williams
The hay is mown and rolled, my summer dreams asleep. The child ascends to dance. In the grayness of gray, each step an entrance, I arrive at the window, you have just walked out the door. Wings shining, eyes bright, you smile your love to me. Wind chimes catch the breeze. Honey bees nestle flowers blanketing fresh dirt. Morning washes over me. Chords from the sonata float with the clouds. Luna moth circling through blue spruce echos greetings. Trees sway, speckled light refracting on lichen and moss. Smooth rocks celebrate the dawn. Breath lifts me—
I am floating I am flying I am once again with you
The red dirt road snakes among chinaberries, ocher fruit of poisoned passion. The child dances in winter. Day rests on the window sill. The strength death brings frees me. The powerless is the powerful. I resume the baci, ceremony of embarkation, my altar stacked with hai blossoms and bhat, blessings from the monkey king, music for the dead, light for the living. I set my sights home, home to the red dirt: to the state of grace in wornness, to the Wabi-sabi, shards of pottery, cracks in gold paint, dissonance in the moonlight— May I be a well filled May I be a song sung May I be a dream remembered
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
DON RUSS
NOT NOTHING: AN AFFIRMATION THE RETURN OF THE SANDHILL
Even light is not nothing CRANES: A LOVE SONG unless everything is nothing and here but not-here inside my head. Lake Panasoffkee, Florida
So too with the secrets of the moon, From somewhere above, behind, or—multiplied, subdivided—of the moon this one blue world we know, it comes again, in mirrors. the one unbroken sound of thousands sounding close and far away.
So too the sun’s work: comets wind- socked out in solar breezes, green curtains You turn to me in blue-eyed wonder, stirred across a ghostly polar sky. not a pilgrim beside me, but another world, tugging at my own world’s wonted path.
Fretted with golden fire, a roof, a Hamlet’s canopy, a “brave o’erhanging I catch your heartbeat and feel firmament” —nothing but words. you breathe with me the wordless breath of all creation, I know our mortal flesh
But if nothing myself, yet has its chance at blessedness. I can be satisfied thinking nothing but that alone.
WAYFARER | 95 SECTION FIVE
KEITH MOUL
RUST HONORS A BLOOM SHOREBIRDS
Cool water would hit the spot, yet, abandoned, The great blue goes bronze in wait a water tower rusts above a desert highway. of prey, so erect as wind tickles surf; the gull flies past, too impatient; Further, a settler misplaced trust in a friend the heron moves to attend an object for a quit claim shack. History marks the event beneath the water’s surface; the gull with a sign among rattlers facing their survival. flies past.
I have water handy. I refresh. I check the tower The earthworm hugs for lessons: always leave footprints in the dust, the trail in the same direction burnishings and sweat. Dehydration threatens, at the same deliberate heron speed: paint wears and chips in wind from inside out, wind whipped in Death Valley to wreak its worse. the sunset transforms a bird to art.
An unknown flower blooms, enough to turn me round and linger, to sniff its scent, oxidized, greased and oiled.
A fuel stop welcomes me to rapidly diminishing supply.
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
HEATHER KIRN LANIER
UPON LEARNING THAT OUR DAUGHTER CAN SWALLOW HER OWN SPIT
Victory in the pot hole, redbellied woodpecker, and you, the pedestrian, the tractor-trailer all Spanish lynx, greetings to averted, our rickety old model cruising your non-demise. Let us go on, all of us, north in the right-hand lane. our inhalations a billion Victory in the black brush-stroke little clouds of molecules that haven’t killed us, branches that this morning not in this are still glued to their trees. They did not crack off in the night moment, not in the last, and shatter our windows. Likewise, the sky our eggs and sperm still sniffing whose birds for the most part stay toward one another to rewrite the world, a world afloat. Crisis averted. Come spring in which sometimes a child they’ll carry—most of them—twigs is born for the nests for the little ones, worms with the incapacity to swallow. to drop inside the beaks so small they could pick locks.
Victory in the millions of un-extinct species, this day an added ho-hum page to turn in the reference book of their Latin- named histories. That’s you,
WAYFARER | 97 SECTION FIVE
MAX STEPHAN
SHIITAKE (LENTINULA EDODES) AFTER THE WILDFIRE, 2017
The name alone makes your mouth water. Like gypsies, nomads, drifters— Go ahead—say it: shee-TAH-ke the foragers arrive under moonlight The acoustics – foreign, curious, tempting… pitching tents, parking trailers, its first syllable, shee— eager to weave their way soft, subtle, like a whisper; through virgin soot and cinder— but the second, a strong, bold AHHH to trek between the black, barren pillars as in Ahhh, NOW I get it— in search of the elusive. a class, a breed in a different league far, far above Laid off lumberjacks, the Button diced on pizza pies. Asian immigrants, traveling bands of Deadhead wanderers— When you think of the Shiitake, some seeking challenge, the taste glands fancy a handful drawn by delectable want, Katsuobushi, Kombu, and Iriko in Dashi… others seeing nothing the bold, brash savor of Miso Soup… Buddah’s Delight. but the dollar sign of Manhattan; The imagination scribbles monks in saffron robes foraging through the forest, their lure, at times picking only those found mature, ready. the Chanterelles, the Matsutake tucked away in shaded nooks To some, this gem has forever been beneath thick, healthy greens— the Donko—the Winter Mushroom; to others, the Huagu—the Flower Mushroom; but here yet no one yearns to know in this ghostly apocalypse, the plainness, the utter simplicity in Montana’s mad aftermath— of the name the world holds tight: with all shades of thriving life removed, scattered beneath the shii trees, with splendor wiped clean, it is the take, the fruit, that calm hands pluck. the Black Morels wake But, ahhh, the Shiitake— and rise to the palate, the chef, triumphant. its name translates as triumph, as unsullied merit, as desire.
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 POETRY
DOUGLAS COLE
TULLIANUM FAST AWAKE
Every moment between these walls I am reaching for the amethyst I flinch at crows dawn-cawing center of the sea apples falling through leaves trying to name every tree branches scraping the rooftop on the peninsula with someone sleeping beside me but in the back of my mind in some other fabric of stone I’m still worried about money that creeps up the nails of my fingers and calculating if I don’t eat and into my light-deprived skin I can save enough for school the walls within walls I live within how many pounds must I shed the layers of muscle I’ve trained to clear the cobwebs of hunger by blind hours in solitary motion while the dog scratches at the door in a two foot by two foot room with that deep-woods look going nowhere in bones wrapped room consumed by drinking rounds in winter fire built out of need crows collecting as time shifts what can I tell you about and I am back in this brackish the glowing walls of mystery current between a falling apple you who can only go so far and a puff of smoke restricted by visiting hours so I ripple my way and institutional rules of contact and sometimes come up for air other than a note left after the fact sometimes eat the earth I say I am here and I am free with eyes like meteors how else to give this to you burning in a green bay an answer for why and how I can speak quietly into your ear when you arrive and find nothing but an empty cell
WAYFARER | 99 SECTION FIVE
AMY NAWROCKI
MOUTHBROODERS CORNSTALKS AT DUSK
With no mind for words, no voice I take the long way, to echolocate underwater, no sinkhole passing cornstalks in the cusp to burrow or free unforgivable limbs of twilight. Kernels from pen caps whose plastic scratches are months away, but dormancy leave no trace of helpful blood, doesn’t come to mind when moods
I take on the company of cichlids and catfish, tiptoe from cold to mild, mouthbrooders who clutch their young from seasonal to expected in hopeful jaws, and search for a more for late February, buoyant form of the art of persuasion. this strange bridge between white and green, when skies are quiet Send me one of those fry harvesters who coax the unspoken out from and day—if it had a breath to hold— worried tongues without harm, sighs with relief. The farm is fallow, without sugar pills or counterarguments. silos closed up; I drive past the field which has no resolve fenced as it is
by reflective white paint and curb lines dividing six o’clock from one minute past. It has been a while since I passed through, since
I unwrapped the husk of hometown, where in the blue silk of twilight I see spaces that I’ve seen before, but never like this, and never so bright.
Volume 08 No. 01 Mar 2019 FEATURED POETS
Kay Merkel Boruff lived in Viet-Nam 68-70 Douglas Cole has published six collections Jason Hinchcliffe spends his days working and was married to an Air America pilot of poetry and a novella. His work has at a legal publisher in Toronto, and most of who was killed flying in Laos 18 Feb 70. Her appeared in anthologies and journals such his nights either writing or thinking about work has appeared in the New York Review as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Bitter writing. He relies way too much on coffee. of Books, Vanity Fair, Texas Short Stories Oleander, and Slipstream. He has been Jason’s poems and stories have appeared 2, Suddenly, Fifth Wednesday, Adanna, nominated twice for a Pushcart and has in 580 Split, the Nashwaak Review, 94 Stone Voices, and Paper Nautilus. She is the received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize Creations and the River Poets Journal. author of Z.O.S. A Memoir. in Poetry. His website is douglastcole.com.
Robert Hirschfield has appeared in Author, Speaker, Consultant Heloise Heather Lanier is the author of the Salamander, Descant, Tears In The Fence, Jones is founder of Fierce Heart™ nonfiction book, Teaching in the Jewish Review of Books and The Writer, Productions. Her book The Writer’s Block Terrordome, and two award-winning as well as many other publications. He is Myth is described as the best book about poetry chapbooks. Her memoir about also putting together a book of Alzheimer what being a writer is. Heloise is intensely raising a child with a rare chromosomal poems that will include “Advent” and “The interested in culture and how it shows up condition is forthcoming from Penguin River,” the two poem appearing in The both in works and a writer’s voice. Visit Press. She lives and teaches writing in Wayfarer. HeloiseJones.com Vermont.
Jessica Martini writes poetry inspired by the Keith Moul is a poet of place, a photogra- Gwendolyn Morgan earned an M.F.A. in Arizona landscape, meditation on the body pher of the distinction light adds to place. Creative Writing from Goddard College, and nature, spiritual questions, and illness. Both his poems and photos are published and an M.Div. from San Francisco She received her MFA from Northern widely. His photos are digital, striving for Theological Seminary and the Graduate Arizona University. high contrast and saturation, which makes Theological Union. She is currently the his vision colorful. Clark County Poet Laureate 2018-2020 in Washington State. FEATURED POETS
Amy Nawrocki is the author of Four Blue Thirty-seven years ago Chris Nye helped C.M. Rivers is a student of practices: Eggs and Reconnaissance. Her memoir The start the magazine, Orion. Now retired writing, cooking, yoga, etc. His work Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory from a career in higher education, he has appeared in several literary magazines has been awarded a Gold Medal for the serves as Chair of the Orion board. His and online journals. He is surrounded by Living Now Mind-Body-Spirit Awards. work has appeared in Shark Reef, Pegasus, stacks of manuscripts, none of which have She is the co-author of three Connecticut Kentucky Poetry Review, Berkshire Review, been attended to properly, and all of which history books as well as the poetry editor of Cut Throat, and other journals. His most threaten to topple over at any moment, The Wayfarer. She is an associate professor recent book is Poems Out of Thin Air. leading to sudden death by paper and ink. of English at the University of Bridgeport and lives Hamden, Connecticut.
Don Russ is the author of Dream Driving Richard Schiffman is an environmental Max Stephan’s writing has appeared in a (Kennesaw State University Press) and the journalist and author of two spiritual bi- broad scope of journals ranging from the chapbooks Adam’s Nap and World’s One ographies. His poems have been published Christian Science Monitor and the Potomac Heart. His poem “Girl with Gerbil” was in various publications including the New Review, to Appalachia and Slipstream. chosen for inclusion in The Best American York Times, Writer’s Almanac, and This Stephan teaches at Niagara University, Poetry 2012 after it appeared in The American Life in Poetry. His first collec- specializing in Contemporary American Cincinnati Review. tion of nature inspired poetry, “What the Poetry. Learn more about Stephan at: Dust Doesn’t Know,” was published in www.maxstephan.net 2017 by Salmon Poetry.
Mark Taksa’s poems are appearing in Cardinal Sins, Bryant Literary Review, and Isthmus. He is the author of ten chapbooks. The Invention of Love (March Street Press), Love Among The Antiquarians (Pudding House), The Torah At The End Of The Train (first place in the Poetica chapbook contest), are the most recent. HOMEBOUND PUBLICATIONS Ensuring the mainstream isn’t the only stream. www.homeboundpublications.com WAYFARER Charting the Way for Change